twenty years and counting

Somethings You Never Outgrow

2011-06-11T21:13:00.005-05:00

Walking into the lobby of my apartment building, I saw an unfamiliar face pacing in front of the elevator. I hated that damn elevator. It's doors, and it's insides, for that matter, were covered in fifty years of ugly grey paint, and it stuck out like a sore thumb against the lobby's deco era neoclassicism. Putting in the new elevator in the 50's was probably the last and only improvement done to my building, and I'm sure it was something they had to do; I'm sure it was the old hand operated type; and I'm sure they got sick of paying someone to run it. I stayed at The Jane a few summers back, where they happily pay young men to operate their elevators. In round red caps in hundred degree weather, no less.
Anywho, the man who was pacing in front of the elevator immediately started talking to me when I stood near him to wait for the elevator.
Do you know who you look like? He asked. No I responded, already afraid where this was going. Jesus! Jesus Christ! You look like Jesus Christ! He said. No, no I don't, I said. Yes! Yes you do! I look like John the Baptist. Well, I've been told that anyway, so maybe you and I should get together and talk to people! He said, as we rode up the elevator. No, I can't do that, I mumbled as I jumped off at my floor. I knew I shouldn't have worn that Jesus Loves You t shirt around the neighborhood.

I'm at the start of 1993 in my story right now, and the start of my twelve step life, and needless to say it was a time of great change for me, all of it monumental. This year, 2011, has also held a lot of change for me, great and small, some of it too heart breaking to ever put into words, and some of it as seemingly small as the closing of my video store Nightstar, and the passings of Elizabeth Taylor and Poly Styrene. I guess I equate change with pain, though the two aren't all that synonymous.
'93 held a lot of painful change for me, most of the time it overwhelmed me so much all I wanted to do was drink black coffee from Starbucks and smoke Bull Durhams, a cheap yet tasty cigarette brand. I was in a fog most of the early nineties, a painful one at that, but it was the pain of building my life back up, in stead of tearing it down. Sometimes I miss the earthy crutch of a day started with coffee and cigarettes.
I began with small steps, like buying a bookshelf and a table and from the Great Ace. (I loved that store, and was sad the day it closed and opened as a Borders. I wonder what will take it's place now?)
I literally had nothing in my apartment, and my soul for that matter, and I needed everything!
I bought some dishes at Pier One, and got some thrift store finds, and tried to understand what it meant to be 'powerless' over something. Over everything. The distraction of shopping helped a lot back then, but as I had little spare cash, I had to do it in thrift stores. That is, til I reopened my Marshall Fields credit card, and felt the soothing caress of Gaultier and Ralph Lauren, even though I was still in a major early 70s phase, fashion wise, and I was taking more inspiration from Bobby Sherman than Jane Forth. I have a sweater from Gaultier's 93 collection; it still looks great
I saw Party at the Theater Building (a place in the future I will perform many plays) when Scot came for a summer visit; it was a hit play about modern gay life, and all the actors were nude by the time the curtain fell. I hadn't a TV for a while, and Scot could only handle one visit without it, and brought his on all his next visits until I finally got one of my own. He started our tradition that summer of watching his taped copies of MST3K, one we held for many years. Renee and I saw Liza and Sandra Bernhardt; Sandra asks a question from 'Brian Vanderbuilt' (me) 'a fellow jew', as to 'why Madonna recorded Fever, when you put it in your act first?' Where she replied ' cause she's a fucking bitch, that's why!'
And I went to Duran Duran with Erin and Greg. I also saw Suede in 93, but I'll tell you more about that later.
Looking back on those times with my friends, I'm reminded it wasn't all bad during those days, as I seem to think it was, and I also had a happy/sad little affair with a guy named Gordon. He was a guy I wished I liked more than I did, or was at least in a better place emotionally than I was, and whom I wished had a better life than he did, or could see himself in a different light. He saw himself as having absolutely no potential, and only seemed to take what he could get, on all fronts, and it wasn't much. He needed someone to lift him out of the morass he didn't know he was in, but one that was immediately apparent. I hadn't the courage or nerve to tell him how I felt, and walked away from our short relationship praying he could one day figure it out for himself.

I got inspired to write this post tonight after beginning to read Just Kids, Patti Smith's latest book. It is so beautiful and heart felt, I already don't want it to end! But I also just bought the latest 33 1/3, Marquee Moon, so I guess I'll have to put it down sometime...

Kid

intermission

2010-12-06T22:23:00.003-06:00

Hello Dear Readers,
I missed my ghostly girls! (Actually, that's Constance Bennett) That font, if you didn't know, is based on Moz's lively scrawl...
Anywho, I am on a writing deadline right now; I must have the first act of my play ready by the 22nd. It is based on a story I wrote ten years ago, which has found it's way to my blog, because it happened to me!
Play writing is going better than I could have hoped, and I am enjoying it! I sure hope you will be able to see it live and in person someday, here in this lovely town of Chicago. As soon as that happens, I'll let you know.
See you in January, with a story about my excesses of '93.

teardrop

How Can I Even Try To Go On?

2010-09-24T10:52:00.018-05:00

So, to pick up where I left off, Danny and I are in New York City, in Pyramid Club, on Christmas eve, 1992, and it is empty, save for the afore described bartender, and a friend or two of his, sitting at the bar. After making a big deal that I was visiting from Chicago, I pass around what I thought was orange flavored candy I bought in Chinatown. I assumed it was candy, it looked like Chinese candy words, but in reality it was loose orange tea. Dehydrated orange peels, to be precise. After a few seconds, we're spitting out the pungent mess. I buy everyone I 'harmed' a drink, which I was loath to do, because that was all the money I had for the night.
Not everyone in Chicago is a total idiot! I said in embarrassment.
Danny and I chugged a few 40s to be frugal before arriving at Pyramid, while we got ready to go out, because he was low on cash, too. Getting ready with Danny was something that was usually more fun than the clubs themselves, and I treasured another night of it.
We stayed a little longer at Pyramid and danced, and then we were off to Cafe Aback, where we met Cheri, a coworker of Danny's. His roommate Michael worked there too, so it was, thank God, free drinks. In the taxi on the way there, he kept making me promise to not let him dance for Tony, the owner. He said he was tired of performing there for free; he'd happily do it if he got paid. Tony could always charm a dance out of him, no matter how hard he resisted.
"Tonight I'm determined! No pay, no dance!" Danny kept repeating.
After listening to Tony's non-stop begging for a while, Danny gave in and begrudgingly flung himself around the dining room to Holiday. Cheri and I stood at a little side bar in another room with a pool table, to wait out Danny's performance. I knew she hadn't known him very long, and I wasn't surprised when after giving her a look that suggested this was an inherent need of Danny's, his need to perform, and impossible to stop once the ball got rolling, she gave me a look as if to suggest:"I know."
The bartender fed us shot after shot, because, according to him, we were dressed as the picture of 1920s Berlin decadence meets 1970s Harlem superfly, in our sequins and polyester, black lipstick and rouged eyes.
I just love how you two look! he said every time he slid us a Jager.
We were bored waiting for Danny to stop dancing around the dining room, a room we could hear but not see too well from our position, bored but mesmerised by a guy trying to teach a buxom girl how to shoot pool. She was obviously a prostitute, but she was hot, so the guy didn't seem to care what the night would end up costing him, we concluded between sips of Jager.
Because the way they were dressed though, Cheri and I kept checking with each other to make sure this was still indeed a bar in New York in the 90s, and not some early eighties soft core porn movie; their clothes looked like costumes to us, and they way she giggled sexily, while he pressed determinedly into her backside, was all too clichéd, and their little show just went on and on, never getting past the "now darlin, aim your stick at the little white ball" phase. I'm sure to them we looked liked impoverished immigrants, who somehow wandered into the hottest bar in New York, and who, by the looks on our faces, obviously had no understanding of the ins and outs of American seduction. There was just the four of us in the room, so it was hard not to notice each other.
Dang Cheri, I'm really drunk, are you? I asked.
Yeah! We gotta get away from this bartender! she said.
Meanwhile, the party in the dining room was roaring at full steam, Madonna turned up full blast, and the few faces I glimpsed seem to like the show Danny was giving them.
After what felt like hours, Danny was back with us and soaking wet, demanding we 'leave this instant!' He refused to talk about what happened in the dining room, promising to tell us all about it tomorrow. We were off to a big night club, exactly what and where I can't recall... it may have been Twilo, or someplace like that.
The next day was Christmas, and we opened presents, Michael, Danny, and I all warm and cozy in our pj's and hang overs. Danny gave me a Barbie, Madonna's Sex book, which I sold on Ebay a few years ago to help pay for an unexpected move, and a book of Jean Cocteau drawings, which I still have. I don't remember what I gave him for Christmas that year other than the necklace I made for him, because I was pretty broke, having just started a new job. After presents we went to brunch, where Michael told his side of the dining room story, and Danny told his side of what happened at Cafe Aback...
It turns out there was an unseemly group of people at a table, not so subtly suggesting a payment from the owner, in return for certain favors. The owner didn't want to make any payments, so the group decided to demonstrate that they were serious. (Do your own math.)
So while Danny danced around the dining room, one of them threw a bottle of beer at him, which missed him but smashed into a wall. A certain celebrity saw who threw it, and yelled at him, saying he could hurt someone, where he said 'shut up n****r', which sent her boyfriend flying across the table, aiming for the insulter's throat. More beer and beer bottles fly across the room, but the music was so loud, and the crowd was so wasted, no one really noticed, myself included.
There was like $20, 000 worth of damage to the restaurant! Michael said. Oh well.

For lack of funds, we spent the rest of Christmas day at the movies and walking around Manhattan without incident. I was leaving early the next day.
I couldn't sleep that night, due in part to the large chunk of sexual tension which had found it's way into our already cramped twin bed. When two pragmatists share a bed, it's always a long night...
Anyway, I hadn't realised I didn't have money for the train to La Guardia, so we tore the place apart, looking for loose change. Danny said I was going to have to ask a stranger for some change, which I ended up doing; I was a dime short. I got lost trying to find the subway from his house, because I never took it back then. After walking up and down the same block four times in my high heel platforms goddamn the seventies!, lugging a bag the weight and feel of a dead body, I finally find the subway entrance, and wait twenty minutes for the train and board the nearly empty car, Danny's written instructions in hand for the transfer from the train to the bus in Queens. After a few stops, a tall man in a Santa hat boarded and made a big production about putting his briefcase on the floor in the middle of the car, almost like he was doing performance art, causing everyone on the train to stop what they were doing and gasp in fear to watch him. All he did was pull out a few papers, which made me wonder why everyone over reacted the way they did.
A few stops later, a hundred ten year old kids squeeze into my train car and fill it up, shattering the early morning calm with their excited chatter. At the next stop, the doors open, and a very drunk homeless lady, clutching an open bottle of vodka in each hand, swayed a moment before she stumbled into the car, to the only open space, which of course, was next to me. She gave me a heartbreaking look that seemed to say:
"Yeah, most people look at me like that. Don't worry, hun, nuttin'll happen to ya."
Please don't let her puke on my Gaultier backpack! I prayed to myself. She eventually moved on without incident, and a few stations further, the train stopped and the doors opened, and a voice inside me screamed:
Get off the train!
But this isn't the right stop! I answered back.
Check again!
And sure enough, this was the stop I needed, and I jumped off in the nick of time. I was distracted by the penises Danny drew on his note for me. I thought, Why does he draw penises on everything? as I almost miss my stop, almost making this horrible day I was having a million times worse.
By the time I got the bus in Queens, I knew I was going to miss my flight, and I started to freak out; I never missed a flight before, and I didn't know what was going to happen once I got to the airport- I had no money. I was so upset, I got off at the wrong airline, and had to beg a ride back on the bus.
"Sir, I'm lost, and I don't have any money, and I need to get to United Airlines!" I said, voice quavering and eyes welling up, to the driver.
"CAN WE HURRY THIS ALONG!" Barked a hardened old New York woman.
He gave me a smile and her a dirty look, and motioned me aboard.
At La Guadria, the ticket agent said she could easily put me on the next available flight, and I began to relax a little, til I remembered I would have to panhandle again at O'Hare, to get the train back into the city, and to work.
Some kind stranger gave me train fare, but I had to walk many blocks from the train stop in the freezing rain to get to work.
Of course it's raining! I thought, getting soaked to the bone.
As I sat idle for a few hours doing nothing more than a haircut or two, and waiting for the day to end so I could crash into bed, little did I realise that was my last weekend of drinking, and a new phase of my life was starting. I was going to learn how to grow some legs, and walk on dry land...

Abbaesque S.O.S.

Only Love Can Break Your Heart

2010-09-19T23:11:00.021-05:00

I forgot to tell you my little New York story, my last drunken hurrah in New York story, one that took place in December of 1992, when I went to visit Danny. I had my last drink some time after Christmas that year, a Christmas I have absolutely no recollection of, (if you're a reader of my blog, you know that's unusual) so this was my last party, as it were, and it was a doozy...

Danny was living with his friend Michael, near the top of a ten floor walk up. It was a large, shabby looking building, in the lower east side, and theirs was a tiny little two bedroom apartment. The building felt smaller than it should be; walls and ceilings were cramped in and close, and everything looked covered in the dust and grime of a thousand broken dreams. The stairwell was also scaled down, built for the size humans were a hundred years ago, and deep grooves were worn into the marble stairs, where in my imagination, hundreds of salesmen trudged up and down over the years to hundreds of deaths, and where slipper clad old ladies carried their shopping-bagged burdens til the day they were found partially eaten by their unfed cats. That was one damned depressing looking apartment building.
Was it built this way? I thought to myself, the first time I climbed the stairs with Danny. Or was it carved up and shrunk down, to make as many apartments as they could, out of the original apartments?
Opening the door into the two bedroom place they shared though, the lightness of the walls and floors, and the large, unshaded windows letting in gallons of sunlight drove out any sense of bleakness, and it actually looked like a nice place to live.
Danny covered his bedroom walls with fashion pictures that inspired him, porn, and his artwork, a picture of which I still have, and in typical New Yorker fashion, he made use of every square inch of his room, giving it that 'early storage space' look. He was determined to become a fashion illustrator, and kept at it for a couple years, inspired by Warhol, and fueled by his friend Bonnie's success, and he drew up quite a collection for his portfolio, some of which he gave to me: Danny, circa 1991

(Now that I write this, I'm remembering I did spend Christmas of '92 with Danny in New York; I mistakenly thought I took this trip before Christmas.)

Alphabet City, where he lived, was still kind of dangerous back then, it seemed to me, and at night I would literally run down the street til I found a cab, but during the day, when the sun light shone bright on public school's late nineteenth century façade, I was more relaxed. I remember reading about Alphabet City in a Blondie interview from the 80s, and presenting it to my ninth grade English class as part of an oral project, because I thought it was the coolest name ever, and vowed to myself to one day live there. Now I wasn't so sure.
Danny trotted that portfolio around New York for a few months, never having much luck, and shared with me many depressing experiences he had hearing the word 'no'. I heard his many stories of how unfashionable he found the fashion world; the bowls of junk food on desks, the bad skin and hair, the sloppy dressers, and the piles and piles of crap strewn about in the designer's and fashion mag's offices: lotions, make up, perfume, bags, shoes, sunglasses, anything you can think of, sitting around half used and discarded, all given freely by companies vying for a little fashion mag ink. What he found most depressing though, was the greedy gleam in the eyes of the staffers who saw his talents, and wanted him to leave his work overnight, or wanted to take his portfolio to another room, where he knew it would be plagiarized. He knew it for a fact because he saw an idea of his in a mag a month after they had turned him down. I loved his work, and did my best to make him keep at it, knowing in my heart the depths of his talent.

My flight got me into New York Christmas Eve, and as Danny hadn't a key to loan me, I met him at the restaurant he worked then, Elephant and Castle. It was small and quiet, and he served me a lovely meal. He liked waiting there, for the most part, but his manager got on his nerves, but in true Wickie-Poo fashion, he turned it into a comedy. That night, an infamous line was born, though I had just missed it's arrival, I knew we would be saying it to each other for years to come:
"Brian! Cheng, my manager over there just said the best thing to me! I was talking to Tracey, the other server, and I didn't know it but Cheng was standing behind me the whole time, and after about ten minutes, he yells 'Talking! Talking! Talking! You ne'er shut up! If you no stop talking so goddamn much Danny, I have to fire you!" in his heavy Chinese accent, making us jump and bust out laughing! That's all we've been saying for the past hour! 'Talking talking talking! I ne'er shut up!'"
"But didn't he say he was going to fire you?" I asked.
"Oh, he won't! He loves me, and the customers do too."
To this day, whenever I meet someone who likes to talk, those words echo in my mind...
Danny told me a lot of E&C stories that night: Koons (NSFW!) came in twice a week, getting so wasted and grabby, the staffers begged Danny for him to wait on him.
Oh shit! It's the Artist! Danny, you deal with him! Please! they begged.
Actually, none of them knew who he was, just that he was a some artist, and one day on that trip I bought a Tashen book of his porno art, where Danny recognized him.
Oh, it's the artist. He said, flipping through the book, nonplussed. And one of Danny's heroes, Franco Moschino, came in not long before he died, and Danny saw a glimmer of recognition in Moschino's eyes, because Danny had sent him dozens of pictures of himself and his work over the years. But, alas, although they are kindred spirits, Moschino kept his distance, and even though he waited on him, they hardly spoke.

(On a side note, I must tell you another quick Moschino story. I've been looking for a while now on ebay trying to find a magazine with an ad for his eponymous perfume, to use as the top photo for this story. He launched the perfume in '89 or so, and for some reason, any fashion mag from that time is now twenty bucks. It's an expensive gamble for me to take, not knowing if there is a copy of the ad I can scan. For whatever reason, I can't find it on a web image search anywhere, except for this lone small picture:

I really need a larger version of it. I'll keep searching. I'm also looking for an image of his other infamous ad, one for his clothing line. It's a model shot by Fabrizio Ferri in black and white silhouette, with a large model airplane perched on her head as a hat. I Can't find them any where! [Alright, I'll take a picture of the Ferri ad from a fashion book I have, but it's not the same...]
Anyway, I was walking down Halsted one day in 1990, and saw a crude xerox of that Moschino perfume ad taped to a light pole, with a big black X over it, and the words Women Aren't This Stupid! scrawled on the bottom. You see, in the ad a woman was drinking the perfume through a straw, even though the text proclaimed: For External Use Only!
I saw that image as a satiristic a take on the days of prohibition, when Chanel No. 5 was a hit, and women reportedly drank their perfume, because at the time France made it with potato alcohol, so it wouldn't kill you to do so. I also had that image on a t shirt, which I got a Marshall Field's as a gift with purchase, when the perfume first came out. I knocked people over to get that tshirt! I about fainted when I saw it. But someone was so offended by Moshino's ad, they wanted the world to know. God, how I wish I would have snatched that flyer off the pole for my scrap book, and how I wish I still had that t-shirt, even though I wore it til it hung on me in rags...)

After dropping off my luggage at the apartment when his shift ended, we walked around Chinatown my first night there, buying up fake Rolexes, fake Chanel button earrings and t shirts, and buying vials of ginseng (the only hangover cure, in my book) and weird flavored candy, like chicken soup and orange pekoe. We scoured the surplus stores on Canal Street looking for anything we could turn into a club look, and hung out for a while with Pat Field in her old 8th Street store, trying everything on, and buying more than we could afford, because her stuff is so great and she is so much fun, and running into Steven Sprouse on the way out, who gave us the once over and a smile. You could see infinity into those blue eyes of his. They were just startling.
The first club we went to was Pyramid, because I had never been there, and I had wanted to go since 1984, when I first heard that Nina Hagen song. It was in his neighborhood, so it was first on our list. We were very under dressed, and almost froze jogging the few blocks to the club, on that chilly December night, forgoing the responsibility of a clunky jacket that would only get in the way on the dance floor. Danny wore an outfit entirely of his own creation: sheer black jeans worn with a sheer black jockstrap, and a sheer black tank top under a sheer black t shirt, a Mr. T quantity of rosaries, all topped off with Cherries In The Snow lipstick, and a large white rabbit fur Russian hat.
I was still in my "I want to be Jane Forth from the early seventies!" mode at the time, and wore my silk lined black bell bottomed wide lapeled suit, and a tenné surfer boy hair do, which Danny found most appalling. The only thing he liked about the 70s was that it got him to the 80s. I also debuted my latest hobby, and wore a multi-stranded red and black beaded choker I made especially for the trip. I made many of them back then, usually accented with an ankh or Maltese cross. I made an all pearl one for Danny, and he said, to my surprise, I should try to sell them at Saks. I created them with beads from thrift store necklaces, and wire from Ace Hardware, and thought them too indelicate for mass appeal, but he disagreed.
Behind the bar at Pyramid early that Christmas Eve was what I would call a living sculpture, slinging cocktails in a hooded white shroud, covered from head to toe in rhinestone brooches, silver Christmas tree decorations, and blinking white lights, looking like a gay gay gay version of the ghost of Christmas Past. Only in New York! He greeted us with a hearty Hello girls!, his surprisingly baritone voice echoing around the empty room. We had the place mostly to ourselves, for in New York I've noticed, and London too, if you're not at the right club at the right time, you're alone...

This post is getting very long, so I'll tell you the rest of the story....later.

St Etienne
some of my early 90s illustrations: Michaelangelo and Boy George
(and yes, I sent George many versions of that illustration, back in the day)
I can now breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the Moschino ad is now in my photo collection to the right. I've been wanting it there for years!

September 4, 2010

2010-09-04T23:21:00.006-05:00

Walking down Lincoln Ave and eating an apple, I saw a tall thin man walking toward me, with short white hair, and a dingy collar length beard. He strode with quick, deliberate steps, chin up, with excellent posture. In my eyes he walked a fine line between looking like a homeless man and an eccentric; his clothes fit him well and were color coordinated, but they were doused with a noticeable amount of grime. His face was shaded with just enough desperation and pathos, though, to make me cover my apple with my hand, lest something yucky float off him and land on it, causing me to unintentionally ingest him.

September 2, 2010

2010-09-02T22:58:00.003-05:00

Leaving work today, I couldn't tell if the sky was dark because of the storm clouds, or now that summer is on the wane, it's just getting darker earlier. I eventually chose the latter, subconsciously telling myself, perhaps, I was ready for fall. When I turned left onto Addison, to get the train, I was stunned to see a bright khaki, dreamlike sky unveiling itself from a dark ceiling of clouds in the far, far west. As I walked on, and looked north and west, I saw the dark ceiling zigzagging east and off to the horizon, revealing scattered vignettes of clouds that looked almost like mountains, an effect caused by the many tall buildings obscuring my view. Whenever I see those mountainous forms, I'll transport myself someplace that has actual mountains, and imagine my life there, and how I would probably be blasé at the sight of a 25,000 foot tall rock formation, and wishing I lived back in the city...

September 1, 2010

2010-09-01T22:21:00.006-05:00

Getting on the #50 Damen bus tonight, I was a little disoriented and thought to myself, damn! all I ever do anymore is ride buses! I walked to the back, where I saw an amazing looking man seated by himself reading a book. He was so good looking, I was afraid to look at him again, for fear of being unable to tear my eyes away from his perfect sandy-grey hair, they way his chest looked in his fitted shirt, and the nice summer glow on his arms. And reading! Books are always sexy. I sat down across the aisle from him, but I was soon lost in the world of my own book, and forgot about him until he got up to get off at his stop, when all of the sudden, in an instant, I was eye level with his butt in his well fitted jeans, and someone was telling him to catch your ear phones, you're about to drop them! Thanks, he said, the sexiest thanks I've ever heard. I wasn't the only one on this bus to notice him. And oh my, that's an adult mohikan cut into that sandy-grey hair of his. I couldn't believe how better looking this guy was when he stood up, and I did my usual, thirty second imaginary life time together, really liking the fake life that flashed before my eyes. As he walked out the backdoor, and walked to the corner to wait for the bus to drive off so he could cross the street, my eyes never left him, really enjoying how his body moved under the clothes he was wearing, and hoping against hope he might sneak a peek at me, when whammo! he turned back to look at me and gave me a little smile.

August 31, 2010

2010-08-31T21:43:00.006-05:00

Leaving home I hadn't time for my normal and very necessary coffee and breakfast, so I was glad the train got me to my meeting a little faster than normal, and I had a few extra minutes to grab something at that Swedish restuarant on Belmont. I've been going there for years, and liked the young lady who normally took my order, but she wasn't there, so her co-worker The Guy Who Likes Me, as I've nicknamed him, got my coffee. He likes to lean in a little too close to hear my order over the ever present cacophonous din, and his eyes never blink, as he looks deep into my soul, as if emitting brainwaves into me that say yes, I want to make love to you... I had forgotten about him, and when I saw him behind the counter, I thought oh, it's The Guy Who Likes Me, but I quickly noticed his eyes didn't lock on to mine like they used to, but kept drifting to the left. When he stepped away to get me some java, I glanced over to see what he was looking at, and saw a gorgeous blonde, looking fresh off the bus from Des Moines, hired to seat customers, who I somehow missed on the way in. As I surveyed the restaraunt, I saw many new young beautiful men, hard at work feeding the frenzied brunch crowd. Oh my, this looks like a fun place to work, I thought to myself. The Guy Who Likes Me returned with my order, his gaze rarely leaving the blonde. Walking out the door, I thought The Guy Who Likes Me seems to have found greener pastures...

August 30, 2010

2010-08-30T18:58:00.006-05:00

Leaving the library today, I passed a young mom, wrangling four kids and a stroller down Lincoln Avenue. Two little boys, aged around six and four, ran up to the deep, gated, stone clad window well, and shouted echo! echo! echo! The younger of the two parroting what the older one did and said. Aw, do kids still do stuff like that? I thought to myself. Walking on, I hear the six year old keep his echo going with a slightly sloppy version of the chorus from Bad Romance, nailing Lady Gaga's monotone Tibetan-like chant: rama ga-ga! rama, ram-a-la! ga-ga, ooo la la! as the younger one tried to keep up. That sounds familiar, I thought to myself not recognizing the song right away, and taking a closer look at the mom when I did. ...caught up in a bad roe.....! That's enough, the mother interrupted, let's keep moving...

August 29th, 2010

2010-08-30T00:07:00.002-05:00

Today at the thrift store, a place where twentysomethings like to gather, the teenage clerk excitedly asked me what I was reading, as I placed my book and on the counter, to pull out some cash to pay for the t-shirt I found. Wow, he really wants to know! I thought to myself. e.e. cummings, I said, poems. Oh, he said, a little bit of his enthusiasm waning, I don't like it when I have to read poetry, he said, as he scanned the tag of my three dollar t-shirt. I have to read them over and over, at least five times, and then I barely understand them!, I said, a little too quickly, perhaps. All desire on his part to talk about e.e. cummings had evaporated, but I felt I needed to keep this conversation going. Despite my efforts, our conversation stalled anyway, and I quickly tried to think of something to say. He kept it a float with: Yeah, but it's worth it, to keep at it, even though you don't understand them, he said to me as he give me my change, as if he were a professor of literature, and he shared that bit of advice to a life time of students. Sage words from a teenager, I thought to myself as I collected my things, and said goodbye.

Was Passed Upon The Stairs

2010-08-26T11:42:00.011-05:00

I find myself again at a point in my story noticing tales untold, tugging like hungry, forgotten children at my threadbare house dress, as I try to scrape together some slop for dinner. No, that's not true; I eat healthy now...
I guess most of us define our lives around moments that are profound to us, be they dramatic or quiet, and my spiritual awakening at the end of 1992 was a turning point in my life, and I rushed to tell you about it, glossing over a lot of the misery, loneliness, and sticky situations. I'm only human! I definitely define my life differently after that moment. Here are some events and moments, large and small, that occurred (mostly) before the end of '92...

I became infatuated with the newly opened library on State Street, named The Harold Washington. In the 80's, when I first moved to Chicago, I spent a lot of time at the old library on Fullerton, when it was next to the El stop. I seem to seek refuge in libraries in times of trouble, and I spent a lot of time there thinking about leaving Chicago in those early days, for lack of funds, among other things. In the early 90's, during those dark days, I went every Monday, my day off, to The Harold Washington, and enjoyed the art installations, beautiful marble parquetry floors, and watching the students wander it's vast rooms, wrapped up in their scholarly errands, while I searched the shiny new book shelves for answers for my messed up life.
I paced up and down the rows of shelves, feeling safe and hidden in the cocoon of books, picking up any and all weird or odd books, and spending the most time with the over sized art books, hoping my subconscious was was receiving whatever message it needed to get me through another week.
Around this time, the radio station XRT was planning a listening party, as they called it, for Morrissey's new CD, Your Arsenal. All you need to do, they said, was to mail in a postcard with your phone number, and if they drew your card, you could go. I debated doing this and decided against it, and a few weeks later I met a De Paul student who went:
"I sent in two postcards, and they called me twice! No one entered this contest! The listening party was actually a meet and greet at the new downtown library. I think there were like less than ten of us there! Morrissey was super nice..."
Of course, it was on a Monday.
I still have love affairs with libraries, and spend time in them in almost every city I visit.

I took this snap in the art deco masterpiece that is the library in downtown LA. Yes, those are plays. I'd spend a lot of time there if I lived there, if I could ever find a quiet corner.

I must have played that new Morrissey CD ten times a day, every day for a solid year. I hear any song from Your Arsenal, and I'm automatically transported to my dusty, tobacco stained apartment on Wrightwood and Pinegrove, floating in a sea of ennui for a bit, til I remember I now live the life I want to live.
I saw his tour of that album that year, with Rene and Tony, and I loved how sexual his performance was that night, (this was during his writhing around on the stage phase of his career) and coveted that gold lamé top. I think I made a copy of that, cutting up a vintage dress of a similar material, which didn't last very long. I think I gave it away to a trick...
The song that spoke to me most has to be Tomorrow. Tomorrow, it's surely nearer now! Naked, begging, wracked with the pain of wanting someone who doesn't want him. Yeah, sounds familiar. I had the giant poster of Tomorrow hung in my entryway, and it was the first thing I saw in the morning, and the last thing when I went to bed. I carried it home for Tony, after the concert, and he let me borrow it for a year. Every now and then I'd remind him he was "bonkers for Will and Yonkers..."

I didn't know it at the time, but Morrissey sang a song by a band that night I was months away from discovering and diving into for a couple years: Suede's My Insatiable One. Too bad more didn't come of their mutual love of each other.
I was also musically obsessed with The Black Crow's Southern Harmony and Musical Companion, Marc Almond's Jacques, Madonna's Erotica, Steely Dan's Aja, k.d. lang's Ingénue, and Bowie's Tonight and Never Let Me Down. Book wise, I was in my Tom Robbins-Is-God phase, and pretty much read only his books the entire year.

The Crying Game came out that year, and Rene and I of course saw it, enamoured with the gorgeous Jaye Davidson. We knew Boy George was doing a song for this movie- he hadn't released anything in a while- but the moment we sat down to watch this movie, we had forgotten it. We both liked the song at the end, and thought Boy could do it justice, somehow not recognizing his voice. We both realized it the moment we got home, and called each other laughing.
In '92 Rene and I ushered for the Miss Continental contest to see the show for free, held at Park West, and knowing BobMackie was going to be a judge caused me hours of anguish in coming up with an outfit. Even though Scot told me he saw "Bob Mackie must die!!" scrawled on a chalkboard in an Art Institute classroom in 1985, I still wanted to impress him. Nothing sparkly a la Cher, or campy a la Carol Burnet, but somehow super cool. In the 90's the 70's were hip again, so I did an updated version of that. I told Rene to wear her Gaultier, here we are, in my kitchen.
Done up in blueprint blue...it sure looks good on you!
Close up, and a full shot of me. I got to meet Bob and had him autograph a napkin which I still have somewhere, and he was a super sweetheart, but the stars of the show that night were Mimi Marks and the gowns floating around on stage, on loan from Mr. Mackie himself. No one can do drag queen like him.

My dad came for his second visit in 1992, staying with me in my fourth floor studio apartment in Lincoln Park. I did my best to pretend I was normal, and that everything was fine, but I was a little ashamed at my sparse quarters, and went out and bought a half a dining table and two chairs from the Ace down the street at Diversey and Clark. My boss gave me some of her old furniture, and my dad drove across town to her place to pick up a lamp and a chair. It was a start, anyway.
I told him to bring his sleeping bag, for that's what I was sleeping on, and we slept on the floor. He spent most the night awake though, and reading the used books we found at the local book stores, because I didn't have a t.v. I told him he could bring one of those, too, but he said it was OK, when he first bought his house he made a year long attempt without one, and it didn't kill him. We smoked a lot of cigarettes and sipped some scotch, and had a good time. We took the 151 bus down to Water Tower to see a few movies, back when they still had a theater, and we went to the Fine Arts Movie theater to see one of the many re releases of Blade Runner. I was excited to show him an old Chicago movie house, and to finally see that movie on the big screen.
We ate at Marshall Field's lunch deli a lot, a deli that kept me alive because I drank the lion's share of my paychecks, and Field's was the only credit card I had, back in the days when you only needed a checking account to get credit. I sometimes had to walk the four miles to Water Tower to eat, but I did it gladly.
We took the Untouchable Tour, the tour of Chicago's gangster past, which ended at the Biograph on Lincoln Avenue, and touched the exact spot where Dillinger left the planet. I got the impression my father didn't feel he was the type of person who could ever live in a city as big as Chicago, but I feel he knew after visiting me, I couldn't live any where else. I still to this day feel guilty about not letting him stay a day longer than he was planning, because he was enjoying our time together, but I made plans to go out that night with friends, and I didn't want him to see me when I 'really' drank. He ran out the door, obviously hurt, but the booze came first. The moment he left I threw my preppy costume in the closet, and went forth as Jane Forth again, into the Land of Booze. (sadly, not to Max's Kansas City, but The Closet. Paté always seemed to know when to shoot first, and ask questions later...)

Scot made his first of many summer visits back to Chicago after he moved away to Pennsylvania. I begrudgingly said he could stay with me that first summer, even though Danny had been filling my head for weeks about the awful visit he had with Scot in New York, and how Scot and a trick trashed his apartment. I was cold and stand-offish toward him, til his side of the story started to sink in, and I believed his version of the events over Danny's. I knew Danny well enough to know when he was over you, he was really over you, and he wanted everyone else to be over you too. By the time Scot had left, I was glad he came to stay with me, and that we were still friends. (I think the friends you've snuck into bars with, before you've come of age, are your true friends!) He's spent some time with me every summer since; summer wouldn't be the same without him.

This summer, Scot was here of course, and I also went to New York, and ran into and talked with Joey Arias at Indochine. He was surprised that I wanted his autograph, and even more surprised when I told him I'd been a fan of his since 1979, and SNL.
"Really!? After all these years?" he exclaimed.
I'll remember the night I first saw him perform til the day I die...

The Man Who Sold The World, David Bowie on SNL featuring Nomi and Arias
Steely Dan Peg
Hot Chip No Fit State

The Body Shop

2010-06-14T12:22:00.003-05:00

This post is for anyone who Googles "Body Shop, 1982 1983". This song's for you, too. We sure had a lot of fun, didn't we? Though, in the immortal words of Fiona Apple, it isn't the red we painted it, it's just rust...

Fast Radio, Under My Thumb

It Doesn't Look Like You

2010-05-31T21:16:00.007-05:00

When I was six years old I had my first contact with the spirit world. My parents had just separated, and on the first night of that division, I walked down the stairs from my bedroom, in the dead of night, in my temporary new home of an apartment of a friend of my mother's, magnetically drawn to the kitchen sink. I was wearing my favorite pajamas, the ones with the brightly colored, cartoon-like hand tools; saws, hammers, wrenches, etc. In the kitchen, I sat on the floor and opened the doors to the cabinet under the sink, and found it empty, save for two white gloves, filled by someone unseen, lit by a hazy blue light. Had I just watched the movie, The Invisible Man? Maybe. I was very susceptible to nightmares after scary movies, so it's possible. Was I dreaming now? It sure felt real.
They had a message for me, those gloves: "If you ever need my help, Brian, just ask. I will always be here for you." A simple message, really, but it seemed like I sat there for many minutes hearing it, as if time slowed to a snail's pace. I hesitate telling this story, because my spirit guide is rather shy, but because I got this message at a time in my life when I needed it, and I got it in such a way as to believe it, I like to share it.

So after that final year of drinking in 1992, I was ready to give up. And by give up I don't mean dry up, I mean stop living. All those nights of going to bed praying to not wake up, and all those days of waking up and cursing the sound of my alarm had taken it's toll, and wore me down. Night after night of going from one dangerous situation to the next, one pill to the next, one stranger... wore me down further still.
There were many many 'final straws' in my drinking days, but one of the last came in late '92, during my ex boss Consita's Christmas party. I decided to walk the five miles to her place, all the while the thought "I'm not going to drink tonight!" rattled over and over in my head all the way there. That was odd, and I took note of it, because I never thought things like that. Sure, many times I thought I shouldn't drink, and wished many times that I wouldn't drink so much, but never I won't drink. So of course, what is the first thing I do but run to the punch bowl and literally down half of it in no time flat, and continue on to embarrass myself in even quicker time, in such a way that still stings today. Yes, I did say 'ex boss' for I had finally quit the job I should have quit long ago. I'm not going to open all my old wounds tonight, so suffice it to say my quitting involved a visit from Danny, and a tube of lipstick. Ha ha! It really did!
Consita and I kept in touch for a while after I left the salon, but when I ran into clients I hadn't seen in a while who were surprised to see me, because they thought I moved to New York, I ended all contact with her. I did talk about moving there a lot, so maybe she misunderstood. Maybe.
I didn't work for a month, thinking I would change careers, and go into make up sales at a department store, and went on a few crummy, uncomfortable interviews.
Erin helped me get my resume together, and coached me a little on what to say, but I think my heart wasn't in it, and it showed.
That was one of the longest months of my life, and to this day, when I'm really depressed, (which is rare these days, I'm happy to report) I eat what I ate for every meal that month: peanut butter sandwiches and macaroni and cheese. I sat in that sun bleached room like an Edward Hopper heroine, snacking and napping all day, smoking and reading thrift store books, staring out my curtainless windows, cursing my life, holding on for the night, when my friends would get me drunk. I was lucky to have the friends I did those days: Erin, Renee, and Mark all have hearts of gold.

I don't know how I heard about the opening at Terra Firma, a salon on Halsted next to Kingston Mines, but I aced the interview, for it felt like home the moment I walked in. But two weeks after I started, after calling in sick many times, my boss called me to his office. He asked me what was wrong, and he was the first person I told I was an alcoholic. It rolled off my tongue like I had said it a thousand times. I noted that too, at the time, for I had spent the last couple years convincing myself I wasn't. I played this elaborate game where the rules changed daily, sometimes hourly, as to what an alcoholic was, and no matter what I did, I was on the winning side: I simply drank too much. I win again. "There is a huge difference between drinking too much, and being an alcoholic, and here's why..." Is what I told myself.
Robert, my new boss, said I couldn't work at his salon if I called in sick again, and I wanted to work there; I couldn't bear the thought of spending any more Edward Hopper time, so I decided to finally do something about it.
That night, when I got home, for lack of a better way to start, I went into the kitchen, got on my knees in front of my sink, and asked the gloves for help. I didn't actually see them there that night, and I was sure my kitchen god could hear me where ever I was, but I thought it couldn't hurt to pray under my sink- there was room, after all, it was one of those 1910 sinks they usually stick a frilly curtain on. (I burned inscence there, and left flowers and oranges under my sink for a year. I still do from time to time.)
I got pretty sick, suddenly stopping all that booze, detoxing over my Christmas break. (I tied on one last big bender, with Danny in New York, which I will tell you about next time- so much happened on that trip.) I was so sick, in fact, I walked over to St. Joeseph's ER, and sat in the dimly lit waiting room one night when I couldn't sleep and feeling on death's door, to get checked out, and was told a few days later I wasn't HIV positive, and I needed antibiotics. I couldn't get warm, and the only way I could sleep was on the floor with my blankets in front of my gas oven, cranked up to 400 degrees. Mark filled my prescription and fed me and tried to help as he could; he even pretended to search for the gremlin that hid in my kitchen. I confessed to him one feverish night I saw a gremlin looking at me, like the ones that got Karen Black, but he said I was having the DTs, and it would pass.
After a few days of trial and error and wild goose chases, I went to my first 12 step meeting, a few days before New Year's Eve, in 1992, when I was 26. Well, it was my second meeting. Ten years earlier I went to my actual first meeting with my friend Michael T, who I used to party with, who was newly born again. He tricked me into going with him. He told me were going some place where teenagers sat around and talked, and I would like it, cause he did. "You also told me I would like that new wave Christian record, but I didn't!" I told him. "This is different!" He said. (I gave a serious listen to that record he gave me, Steve Taylor's I Want To Be A Clone, and rejected it, because I truly valued my individuality, even though it caused me a lot of pain at the time, and because of the oft repeated lyric "You're so open minded that your brain leaked out" made me think I'd reather have no brain that a closed one, no matter what the spiritual cost. Of course you can find him on Youtube!)
After a few moments in that room, I was petrified. These kids were talking in the open about all the secrets in my life I was desperately trying to keep hidden. I went into a white blindness of denial, after I realised what was going on. I willed my spirit out of that room, until Michael dragged me out.
But this time I was ready. I would sign any paper, take any test, fill out any forms, take any class, pay any tuition I needed to, to stop drinking. I was happy to find out the only requirement for membership was a desire to stop drinking.
I was a little disappointed in that first meeting, because they talked about the importance of having God in my life, always with the asterisk as we understood him, which meant nothing to me at the time, because I didn't understand as we understood him. I just kept telling myself what I told Brad, when I tried four years prior to get him into a 12 step program, when he would say "No! They make you make your life about God!" where upon I would say "How is that worse than what our lives are about NOW?!" referring of course, to the river of misery flowing through our lives, courtesy of drugs and alcohol.
I kept going back to that meeting, because I realised I was more afraid of the first word of the first step, 'We', than the word God, and because of the feeling that washed over me for the first time in years: hope.

The Cure- A Night Like This

I'm In Love With A German Film Star

2010-05-16T22:30:00.015-05:00

for Michael VD

So I was in the video store the other day for ten minutes before I realised they had actual videos for rent. They also have DVDs, but there were hundreds of videos on the shelves, gathering dust or not, I'm not sure, I didn't get too close. I usually run in and out of my neighborhood video store, Nightstar, because it is the kind of place where lingering, and perusing, are frowned upon, which I think is odd nowadays because most people in search of a movie get it free off the web somewhere. If the store is even open. They have the worst hours. In that store, it's still 1984, and in their little neck of the woods, they've got the movie rental market cornered. Of course, I am obsessed with this place. I even bought their t-shirt.
I've gotten into long conversations with friends who also go there, which usually start with the phrase: Guess what happened to me in Nightstar the other day! We share rumors and create theories as to why they are the way they are: curt, surly, and impatient, but we all keep going back to rent their movies.
For the past four years, I've only ever had fleeting glimpses of those distinct video box shapes, which I push out of my mind, as I run to the front where the newly released DVDs are, while thinking "That can't be what it looks like, can it? I won't stop to look! Just get in and get out with Coco Before Chanel" It's the kind of place, too, where I feel judged by what I rent. I have to get a 'cool' movie when I go, or be viewed a tool. "You'll watch any shit!" I imagine them thinking, when I place Couples Retreat on the counter. I'm sure they aren't really thinking that...

Does Nightstar Video still carry videos because the word 'video' is in it's name, perhaps? I don't know if they have new videos, or if new videos are even still made; I haven't investigated that far yet. I've only recently felt comfortable enough there to linger a few minutes past the new release area. Well, I should say ready. I'm only just ready to accept the fact they have videos for rent. That store is like a time machine. I don't know why I'm so uncomfortable around all those VHS boxes, because I still have and use my VCR, and I regularly buy videos. Some old favorites of mine, like Times Square and Breaking Glass haven't been released on DVD, and some movies were issued on DVD only once, making them hard to find and expensive. Maximilam Shell's Marlene is $150 used on DVD, while you can get a VHS version for around seven bucks. My copy from ebay came in it's old clam shell case from an Upper West Side video store converting over to DVDs. You know I love that!

As you may have guessed by reading my blog, I'm a little obsessed with Hollywood. Especially old Hollywood. When I was a kid, around ten or eleven, whenever I saw Marilyn Monroe on TV, I would say aloud: "I'm going to meet her someday!" My parents never contradicted me. I was crushed that day in the library when I was thirteen, when I finally drummed up enough courage to look up her bio, and learned she died before I was born. Sigh...alas.
My love for movies started one summer in the early seventies when I was a kid, where you could find me every morning in my basement in the dark, watching the old movies they showed on TV before noon: westerns, gangster flicks, all the Beatles and Busby Berkeley movies, and all the Bette Davis, Jean Harlow, Jerry Lewis, Abbot and Costello, Charlie Chan, Hope and Crosby, and Dean Martin movies. During the morning movies, they had teaser commercials for the monster movies they showed on weekends. They were the best commercials, because they cut together a bunch of clips of monsters slowly creeping up on unsuspecting damsels, or monsters slowly opening their eyes and coming to life, all to the tune of Joe Cocker's You Are So Beautiful, with an announcement at the end: "This weekend's Monster Theater movie is I Was A Teenage Werewolf! Starring Michael Landon!" Oh, I just loved the irony. These memories came flooding back to me recently, for I found a picture of me and my family in that basement.
My neighbors back then were teenage boys in high school, and they were also fans of monster movies, and had books in their living room about them, which I looked at as often as I could. One book particularly interested me, mainly because the movies in it were too scary for regular TV, and I wasn't supposed to look at it, it was too graphic. I'd sneak peeks in it when I could, repulsed and intrigued at the same time, til I was caught, which was every time. Every now and then I make a web search for that extra scary monster book, for old time's sake, but I can't seem to find it.

Video stores were a dream come true for me, when I was younger, because here was a place I could go and get two or three old movies at a time and catch up on everything I missed. I spent hours at a time in them, alone and with friends, deciding what to get, because videos and VCRs were expensive back then, so I didn't rent many movies. (I didn't have my own VCR until 1993.) Because of that, I was very careful in my video selections, getting as many of my top ten choices as I could.
In the early eighties, I even dated a guy I wasn't attracted to, just because he worked in a video store, and I could watch all the movies I wanted. I spent all my Sundays with him at work for a while. "We could have our wedding here!" I would tease. I distinctly remember watching Christine, The Dead Zone and Stallone's rereleased bad 70s porno, Party At Kitty And Stud's over and over. He ended it with me one night when I let slip my true intentions: "I don't want to sleep with you, just show me more movies..."

I don't know what I'm feeling, exactly, when I'm in Nightstar, but it triggers something. Am I sad about video stores nearing extinction, or missing all the friends I spent hours with haunting them? Or is it because movies don't feel as special to me as they once did? I thought it might have been because I've 'seen them all', but I know that's not true; I rented some great old movies there recently. I guess progress sometimes makes me sad.

This year, I got to be a little part of movies, by attending the red carpet arrivials for the Academy Awards. I was hoping to see in person some old movie stars, like Elizabeth Taylor or Lauren Bacall, but I had to settle for Mickey Rooney and Christopher Plummer. But I must say, seeing Meryl Streep live and in person was something special- she lit up the place. I was lucky enough to sit in the front row, by the TV Guide cameras, and make little movies of my own, with some of the stars who showed up that day. That's me, in the glasses and short sleeve shirt, sitting next to the red stairs, gazing lovingly upon Keanu. I didn't know this was going to happen that day, for if I had, I would have passed out scripts, and made a better movie for you! I made 'little movies', as I like to call them, with Hellen Mirren, Gabourey, George Clooney, et al, if you care to view them.

I've been making some progress in Nightstar lately, and having actual conversations with the guys behind the counter, and asking for movie advice, and getting compliments on my choices. Believe it or not, I think the real reason I feel weird looking at the shelves of old video boxes when I'm there is the thought of getting caught red handed, living in the past....

The Passions

The Room Is Quiet

2010-04-21T23:20:00.016-05:00

I hated him seeing me drunk. I don't know why, I mean I didn't know him, and I had just spent all that time and energy getting drunk, so why didn't I want him to see me drunk?

He was Max, the door man of my new apartment building. Well, door man of a sorts: he sat at a folding table in my lobby, a bible propped open next to a thermos, and a baseball bat leaning against his chair.
The lobby was treated much the same way most vintage buildings in Chicago are: coated in dozens of layers of paint. It had little hints here and there of it's modest former glory
of the 1920's when it opened as a hotel, but it was never what you would call grand.
A few weeks after I had moved in, there were a rash of muggings in and around my building, and Max was hired to sit guard in our lobby from midnight til sun up. He was a nice guy, but we never said more than hello and goodnight to each other the year or so he worked there, but I can't deny I was kind of waiting for him to talk to me about Jesus, because I never saw him without that bible, but he never did.

I guess I hated Max seeing me drunk because of the looks he started giving me when I would stagger in the front door at four in the morning. They were looks of pity and disdain, with a dash of contempt thrown in. Could it be he was only returning the look I had given him and his malformed arm, with a dash of doubt of his protect abilities thrown in? I hadn't consciously looked at him that way that I knew of, but I was usually pretty blasted. I had no doubt he could stop anyone he wanted to with that bat. He was also over weight, and in his eyes I saw he had taken a lot of shit in his life for his deformity, and that can grow an anger in someone that could stop a freight train, if you weren't careful.
I wonder, did his contempt grow as time went on, as he saw drunk after drunk stagger home? I'm sure I wasn't the only one; I lived in a big building at the time.
"They pay me to look out for these losers night after night? This is what my life has become?" I imagined him thinking to himself.
As I left my building night after night to go to the bars, I prayed as I walked past Max at his table I would come home to him asleep in his bible. If he was asleep, I could usually sneak in without waking him. The odds on that were 50-50.
"Oh thank God he didn't see me wasted again!" I thought to myself as I slid into the elevator unnoticed.
Though sometimes he fell asleep face up, snoring away at the ceiling, bat in hand, and snapping to attention and ready to pounce, when my key hit the lock.
As time went on, the expressions on his face went from 'here comes drunky again!' to that of pure pity, especially on the nights I couldn't open the door by myself, to that of pure contempt when I brought strange, equally drunk men into my place
But why oh why did I care if he saw me drunk or what he thought of me?
Well, maybe, because in a bar, I blended in with my surroundings. Most people, if they were out at three in the morning in a bar were probably drunk, but in my lobby, I was the only one. And it was night after night. If it were once or twice a month, I'm sure he wouldn't think anything of it. But it was night after night, me wasted in my lobby, and I knew he was quickly going to see me as a drunk. And if he saw me as one, the day was probably coming when I would have to see myself as one...

I didn't have much in my new studio apartment, and that made the long, lonely nights of Aja, cigarettes, and scotch seem to last for an eternity. I got rid of my futon because I moved into the hotel, along with any other furniture I had. I slept on the floor with some blankets and pillows next to my loud loud alarm clock. I sent a lot of my things to my dad to store for me, for I hadn't felt it necessary to have things, even though my only two regular visitors, Renee and Mark, begged me each time they come over to please take their spare pieces of furniture, if only as a loan. But I said no. No to T.V., no to chairs, I just had my boombox, frog collection and my black, 1970's polyester suit. I was obsessed with that thing! I only ever wore that when I went out to the bars. I lucked upon it one day in Value Village; it was my holy grail of vintage fashion finds. It was that perfect combination of hideousness and coolness: no one but Versace models were wearing bell bottomed suits at the time; I couldn't have felt more blessed. I can't find a picture yet of me in that suit presently, I'm sure there's one around somewhere. I wore it regularly til about '95, when someone burned a hole in the jacket with a cigarette in a night club in New York. Oh well, all good things must come to an end, I suppose.
The scent No. 19 instantly brings me back to that threadbare empty room; I wore that most of the 90's, as does Arden's Sunflowers. (OK, I admit it, I wanted to be Jane Forth. Here's me, 1992.)
I don't really know where my frog obsession came from: my ancient Bavarian ancestors, maybe, or the ghosts of lake Butte Des Morts? I had to have them around me, and whenever I saw one I bought it, be it on a hat or t-shirt or pin, and I carried one with me at all times, one for work and one for going out. I found out later through my friend Phillip that in the Native American culture, frogs represented a change of life, or dual life: they start life under water as tadpoles, eventually growing legs and walking on land. Something I was about to do myself...

I saw Lush at Metro with Renee twice that year, loving both shows, transfixed by their fuzzy, lyrical chords and the pretty pathos blasting out the speakers.
Sweetness and Light

I was digging around my record collection the other day, and thought you might like this:

Oblivious 12" Mix

The Shadow of Your Call

2010-04-04T23:45:00.012-05:00

Lots of songs in this post you need to listen to!

Today, something happened to me that also happened in my 8th grade art class. Yes I can, for whatever reason, remember every gory detail of my 8th grade experience. And if your 8th grade days were anything like mine, come, come and join me on the pity pot. There's plenty of room...
I took that class with one of my best friends, Cathy Smith, and we constantly got in trouble. My art teacher, rather than supporting my creative and effete ways, like I had hoped she would, chose to hate my guts, and punished and humiliated Cathy and me unmercifully. I refused to ever step foot in another art class until my senior year, and that was only because I had moved to another state. I was glad I did because that art teacher went above and beyond her duties to help nurture my gifts, such as they were.
Her art class was so amazing and wonderful that I was sad when I thought of all the great classes I could have taken over the years, and vowed, when I was seventeen, to always go back and try again, no matter where, no matter what.
Anyway, back in 1979 in my art class, Cathy wore an actual YMCA t-shirt over her Village People t-shirt, and I of course noticed it, because her shirt was slightly transparent and I could see the fun-house effect her boobs gave the iron-on transfer of the guys in the band, and we of course found it hilarious and wouldn't shut up about it until we (of course) got yelled at.
So, as an homage to Cathy, and cunty art teachers everywhere, I wore my Yo Japan t-shirt over my Harajuku Lovers one today. I just thought you should know that....

Hmm, how do I ask this...do you have a certain place in the world where things happen to you? Meaning whenever you set foot in some particular spot, your life changes? I have a few. Whenever I go to Milwaukee, something shitty happens. Well, I should clarify that statement and say whenever I go to Milwaukee to have fun, something shitty happens. These days, whenever I have to be there, I try to fend off any bad juju by I reminding myself in the form of a mantra exactly what I am doing there: Catching a train. Taking a flight. Just passing through! Please no one throw a turd out the window at me!
I guess I can't say every time, because nothing much happened when I saw Coldplay there a few years ago, although I'm sure some would argue Coldplay is it's own punishment. My other areas are St. Mark's Place and Battery Park in New York. The St. Mark stories I'll save for another day, but suffice it to say instant karma exists on that street for me, rarin' to go, brass knuckles hidden in her fists.
The first place I ever sent foot in New York was in Battery Park. It was a lovely spring day in 1980, I was with my family, and we drove down from Connecticut after much begging on my part. Being a fan of the late seventies music scene, especially Blondie, and loving the very unromantic picture they painted of New York urban life, well, I just couldn't wait to see it for myself!
Also, back then I saw New York as a place that fostered and encouraged people to be themselves, or whatever they wanted, and I longed to be there, because I wasn't safe being who I was in my stifling little town. Thank God SNL beamed all those weirdo bands into my life in the late seventies, and Night Flight exposed to me more of New York's liberated underbelly, and LA's as well. La cage aux folles, as they say.
So who is the first person I see, sitting alone on one of Battery Park's winding benches, wearing red glittering jelly shoes, tight blue jeans, and a shirt that was more blouse that shirt, but Jobriath. (Clear plastic shoes and clothing, sprinkled with a touch of glitter was a short-lived trend for the mega-cool in 1980, but I still feel the need to reach for things like this.)
That is exactly what I want to be! My brain screamed in my head, as I craned for a better look, a longer look, without my family noticing. He sat casually reading a book with body language that said: Yes, I'm wearing a silly outfit in the park, and I'll be wearing something silly tomorrow, and that's because I live in New York, and I can do what ever I want, without fear of retribution. Ho-hum, licking my finger, turning the page...I wanted to be him because he was comfortable in his own goddamn skin.

I actually didn't know of Jobriath until Morrissey started talking about him a few years ago, and when I saw that little clip of him as 'Cole Berlin', it became Jobriath in my mind who was sitting on that bench way back when, because for years I wondered about 'that guy in Battery' so to put and end to the question, I decided the answer was Jobriath. Ask, and ye shall receive...

So to tie these stories into my continuing saga, of which I have been neglecting of late and promise to be better, by picking back up in the spring of 1992, when I moved out of the transient hotel and into 420 Wrightwood. That is the place where my life started to change, and I of course, remember every gory detail of that, too. One day in mid April I just could not take where I was living any more, because I finally saw I wasn't like most of the people there, who were either running out the clock, or victim to their addictions. I had spent so much goddamn time imaging the world without me in it, it was time to imagine something else.

So I walked over to 420 because I remembered my old friend Candace used to live there, where upon I met Lois, the building's manager, who with a burning cigarette perched elegantly in her inelegant hand, showed me their only available studio. The apartment building had been built as a hotel in the twenties (you know how I love that) and converted into apartments in the 40's, for returning GI's, I would guess, and very little else, as is typical in my Chicago apartments, was different. Though instead of putting in new kitchen sinks, they found a stock pile of sinks from 1905, and the fridge was fresh off the assembly line in 1966, but the original 1940s linoleum was in good shape. After I moved in my two bags, it took me all day to clean under the Buick-like stove because it seemed I was the first to do so since nineteen fucking seventy. When I was finished, I sat on the carpet in front of my sliding french doors, and watched the rain fall on my little balcony, smoking menthols and drinking tea, happy with my new life. My fourth floor view looked to me what I imagined Florence would look like, what with all the church domes in my view. But what my eye kept coming back to, over and over, was the rather large inscription etched in stone on the side of the building out side my window: Ye Shall Know The Truth, And The Truth Will Make You Free...

do or die
world without end
art teacher (for ms. t)

Move A Hand In Front Of My Eyes

2010-02-14T22:19:00.018-06:00

I used to ask myself, back in Nineteen Ninety-oneville, why I was the way I was, and how could that be changed? I used to wonder why I was living this life, and not one I wanted to be living. I think that is what being young is all about. The whys. Why why why. Why am I miserable? Why don't I have a boyfriend? Why did it feel like I was sliding off a cliff, about to be dashed on the rocks in a raging sea, grasping for anything to hold onto, while no one seemed to notice?
Why can't I be living in a charming little garden condo, with some golden brown curls bouncing playfully as I greeted guests at my front door, flinging it open with a big smile and welcoming laugh, while my boyfriend shakes his head and smirks at my exuberant ways, as he walks up behind me and puts his arm around my waist? Why can't I have that?
No, it seemed I'd rather steam up the car windows of random strangers, dragging myself home in the predawn light, only to crawl out of bed, head pounding, in the late afternoon to fling money at the Canton Express delivery guy. It seems I'd rather do that.
If I knew the whys, then it ought to reason I would be able to get what I wanted, or, if I knew why I didn't have what I wanted, maybe I could figure a way to get it.

The new season of Lost is reminding me I used to, in my mind, like the Wicked Witch of the West, peer into my crystal ball and observe my life if all the past injustices, imagined or real, had not been thrown at me. As if 'the plane had never crashed' as it were. I liked what I saw. I spent a lot of time looking at it. The little paragraph above is just a small sampling of the life I felt I should have, but didn't, 'because of other people'. Not very original, I know.
I also wondered why the things I used to do for fun felt like a chore and made me miserable. Mainly drinking and going out. I don't know how to have fun any more? When did this happen? And why was I surrounded by people who upset me, and who's presence I dreaded? What happened to the friends I loved?
Thank God for Rene. She was the one constant in my life at this time who kept me afloat. Although, according to some of the Berlin gang, I should have moved our relationship to the next level. Whenever someone brought it up, my first thought was "but I'm nuts! I can just barely make it to work these days, and I find joy in nothing, existence is horrid." I would shrug my shoulders and say 'hmm'. I must also say thank God for Mark, too. He called me everyday, whether I wanted him to or not, even though we had broken up, and were now 'just friends'.
Rene helped me move into a transient hotel on Diversey and Pinegrove that spring of 1991. Cath and Chris and I went our separate ways from our Sheridan Road apartment, and living in a hotel seemed to be the right decision at the time.
When I think of 91, it feels like a bad dream. That year felt like one of those dreams where you can't move your body the way you want to, or with the speed you want, like the forces of gravity had some how tripled. I could see faint shapes and fleeting glimpses of people around me, but as much as I tried to, I couldn't be heard. I felt like I was lost in the woods in the dark, on trapped in an old haunted house. And my new apartment wasn't helping. The walls were paper thin, and most of my neighbors were starving octogenarians, forgotten by their families, or drug addicts, or the borderline destitute. The gloom was sometimes interspersed by the occasional international traveler on a budget, and their high spirits and enthusiasm were a welcome change. I was recently reminded of my hotel days while staying at the Jane in New York last year; seeing the characters floating around that place gave me pause, and a lot to be grateful for.
Rene was less than thrilled moving me there, but I wouldn't listen to reason. I had shipped most of my things back home, and subsisted on very little in way of possessions.
I did all these things, moving where I did, and getting rid of my stuff, because I knew I wouldn't be living much longer. I just knew. I felt it way deep down. Believe it or not, I was still jogging most every night. I was drinking every night, too, and started thinking long and hard about vodka with breakfast.
I went back to check on the Sheridan Road apartment, because I moved out before Cath and Chris, and because Scot reminded me our names were still on the lease, and found Cathy left a lot of her posters on the walls. I gasped in shock when I saw she left Bowie's Glamour to be tossed out and didn't give it to me; I thought she knew how much I coveted it! (It's hanging in my bedroom as we speak.) Seeing the poster and taking it off the wall of the vacated but not empty apartment made me feel a bit like a tomb robber; that's how much I valued it. (To this day, I search in vain for a compilation book of Edward Bell's art work, still not sure if one actually exists.)
I wonder, was that act of taking the art off the wall and bringing it home a test of some sort? A test that I passed? Was that all my soul needed, my subconscious, as way of proof that I could eventually find some sort of happiness in my life, that I wasn't a hopeless case? Sometimes it seems like these small events have huge consequences.
As you may or may not know, I'm obsessed with Bronzino. To the extent I made this a year ago. I almost started to cry when I read that the Met in New York was doing a show of all his known drawings; I never thought I would see that day, his work is so fragile, and I definitely cried when I saw his name emblazoned on the front of the Met, as I walked up the stairs.
At the end of the show, there was an x-ray study of one of his paintings the Met owns, Portrait of a Young Man, giving incite into his creative process. For centuries, no one but Bronzino knew how many times it was rearranged and repainted, or how he created it. The researchers were surprised to discover the number attempts he took with paint, as opposed to preliminary shetch work, and how the light grasp he held in his mind of the image he was creating- he was open to change whenever it needed to happen.

Night after night in that hotel on Diversey, eating cold meals (no kitchen) on the edge of my bed, listening to the meager sounds of the slowly dying (no TV) slipping into my room, wasn't too fun. But what the final straw was, what had made me move out after three months, was the day I witnessed the day I would have died...

The Bronzino show will be at the Met until April.

At the Met, 2008
We Have A Technical
Why I love MJ

Even In The Launderette

2010-01-15T23:36:00.003-06:00

I almost forgot to tell you...
You can now buy my first published story! It's in a new gay/lesbian quarterly, named Mary. It's a combination of a few stories culled from these pages and told anew for William Johnson. It's a great collection of some new voices in literature, and a steal at ten dollars! Run, don't walk to your nearest Paypal!
You'll be hearing from me sooner than later...
BC

The Angels And Martyrs

2010-01-01T18:02:00.026-06:00

OK, so I know I've already posted this photo, but as I was looking at it tonight, I noticed weird things about it I hadn't before: mainly, I know every person in the photograph. If you look at the faces behind Chris (the one in plaid) they are, in order, Cath, Tyler, and Tracey. Chris and I (the one in all white) are bookended by two guys I dated. Skip, my date that evening, is on the right in all black. (I forget the other guy. Not for bad reasons, I just forget.) I thought it might have been Skip, it was twenty years ago after all, but when I saw this photo from the same night, I was sure. The guy behind Skip was a friend of Scotty's, Randy I think, and we had a hot/cold relationship because we kind of liked each other, but we also fought over Skip. He really annoyed the hell out of me at the Shakespeare's Sister show at Metro, the following year. (Coincidentally, Morrissey was in town the same week.) I distinctly remember thinking, "I would be having a much better time at this concert if So and So would quit that non-stop queeny arm flailing in Siobhan's face. YES! She sees you!" That show, believe it or not, was sparsely attended, and he stood out like a sore thumb. But I guess I really can't fault fanly enthusiasm. I find it amazing though, how Rene, who took this photo, was able to capture, with one little well timed snap of her finger, all of these people in my life in 1991. Lastly, the two angels of the far right, hands earnestly clasped in our direction, praying for us all, I knew best of all...

This post is going to be different, because I got some bad news recently about two guys I have written about here. Bryan, who I wrote about in Whisper Loud And Clear, and Donny who I wrote about in Waiting For The Day have both died. I saw Donny working at a make up counter in New York a few years ago, and pretended I didn't see him. Ugh. So to cheer myself up and celebrate their memory, I feel like I have to add some extra color and some unseen surprises, so I dug through my photo boxes and found some goodies. Check the links out at the bottom.

Chris, above, always thought Boy George sung a little sharp. He was quick to add that that was part of his charm; the imperfect sweet tones of his singing voice. When we all found out he was doing two shows at Bistro Too, a club we got wasted at a million times before, it took us months to figure out what we were going to wear. I vividly remember the cold drizzly day in 1991 I took this off a lamp post on Halsted and Addison.

It took Renee and I many trips to Boytown's alternative clothing mecca, 99th Floor, to debate themes, accessories and price points. We knew we wanted to be noticed and daring, so the minute I found my Tova Borgnine Collection-reject motorcycle cap, and Renee found her black feather bustier, we had our foundations to build upon. They did pose a myriad of questions, though: Did we really want to spend $150 dollars on the perfect shoes? Were we really going to wear those satin tuxedo shorts again? Should we go to Chanel, too? Can I really pull off red plaid leggings? Is buying three necklaces and turning them into one a good idea? The answer to all those questions turned out to be yes. Except the Chanel one. I found what I was looking for in a paralegal lady type catalog for 29.99. I had it sent to the salon, and was so afraid of missing it, I made Renee drive me to work and wait with me in her car for the UPS man, in case he came the day we were normally closed. Yes, I was that desperate to show up in a knock-off Chanel.
Hours later, after dozens of cigarettes and cocktails, the hair was done and the make up applied, we swung by Berlin to show Tasso the outfits we worked so hard on and took some snaps, and sped north to Bistro Too, to breathe the same air of our raisons d'etre. The first time you see a musician you truly love is the best.

The mood at the club was high, we were all excited for the show, and Renee abandoned me for the front row the second George walked on stage, and she took some great shots of him in that gorgeous jacket Leigh Bowery made for him: pic1, pic2, pic3, pic4, pic5. He didn't disappoint, and we found out when we got there the later show was moved to the next night, and we were more than happy to come back for more. I don't know why I just have one photo from the second night, but it's a good one! We took a casual approach to the second night's outfit, because of all the stress we created for ourselves on the first one. That's Cath's bedroom. This was mine . Chris is wearing my shirt. Jesus I was obsessed with Jesus...

I saw Morrissey twice in 91, one of which I wrote about in Found Found Found, and the entire summer night is etched into my memory forever, but I do not remember one second of the other show he did that fall, even though Renee assures me that yes, we did indeed attend (I have the stub)and even though it was almost the same week as Boy George's shows. I tend to confuse it with his 92 concert at Poplar Creek, which I remember quite well. Oh well, I guess I took too many drugs or something.
I also saw 808 State in 91 with Mark, whose tape, United State 90, I played to death and Circe Du Soliel with Renee, when they still did their shows in tents. The other show that really stuck with me was the Degenerate Art Show at the Art Institute. It was labeled 'degenerate' by the Nazi's, who knew full well the power of art and imagery to sell their schemes. The art they chose portrayed an idealised view of life, for I guess they were after and selling a kind of 'perfection'.
The art in the degenerate show elicited an emotional response from the viewer, or it inspired debate, be it by the artist's use of color, subject matter or manner of painting. I found room after room of paintings leaping off the wall like that intoxicating and inspiring. I left the museum that day a changed man, with a clearer sense of who I was as a person and an artist, for of course I'm not a degenerate, I'm provocative! For only the basest of cultures label art like that 'degenerate'.
"What you are seeing here are the crippled products of madness, impertinence, and lack of talent" One official declared. Indeed. No wonder it's still one of the most attended art shows in history...

1. Keep Me In Mind (Japan) 2. Going Boy for Renee 1992 3. Erin & Carlisa 91 4. 1987 Limelight invite 5. Nene 91 6. NSFW card Wikie used to pass out 7. Not them, but us! 91 8. Ooo, a rare 1984 pic of me with some one obviously obsessed with me 9. Why I use pics of movie stars...Renee 10. Why movie stars...Tone & Cath 11. Why movie stars... Erin 12. Tickets 13. Pictures of people who love you and kick things (w/Renee, w/the late Donny w/Renee w/Mark, early 90s) 14. The late, great, loved, Bryan, 1985

I almost forgot: a mixtape, circa 1994 about Brad, 'pity, pity', and a pic of me writing this post...

Time Off From The Rain

2009-12-01T22:09:00.006-06:00

We knew our downstairs neighbor was dying. Chris told me one night about meeting him as he moved in with his parents.
"Our son is too ill to live alone, because of AIDS." He's lucky to a family like yours, Chris said.
Looking back to those days of 1991, I wish I would have spent sometime with him as he lay dying, but I wasn't strong enough. When I walked past his front door, on my way up to my third floor apartment, my imagined image of him grew more and more detailed, and as the weeks went on, so did the aura of sadness emanating from their home.
I knew the day had come when he had passed, when on one Sunday morning, I saw his family getting into a big black car, on Sheridan Road, in front of our apartment building. I sat at my window and watched and waited for them for what felt like an eternity for them to drive off, on that cool sunny day.
The women were buried under their expressions of grief, and the faces of the men bore a quiet compassion for their women.
Chris, Cath and I left some flowers at their door. He was he first person I knew who died from AIDS.

During this time in 1991, Chris and I took the bus downtown every Sunday for the parties at Cairo and The Victor Hotel. The bus let us off a good mile from Cairo, and I looked forward to this time with him, as we crept through the deserted city streets. On the way to Cairo we had to pass Limelight, which had just closed or was about to, and we regaled each other with the stories of our past glamorous lives. Here we were now, just scraping up enough change to take the bus. Thank God we were already stoned. I have no idea how we got home.

I call 'that place' The Victor Hotel, because I rarely had a good time there. Cairo wasn't a whole lot better, but I distinctly remember thinking a few times, This is fun!, or I wish this place was a little funner!. At the Victor Hotel, it was always: This is no fun. And I got into a lot of fights there. The exceptions being the night the Live Brady Bunch performed the Johnny Bravo episode with Eve Plum, and the night Deee-Lite performed. But by the time they went on we were so wasted we barely remember it happening.
At Cairo, Chris and I stood off to the side and watched the action on the dance floor in the basement, wondering aloud why the revelers looked so happy. Were they faking it? Was it drugs? Drugs never made me that happy. They made me take off my clothes at inappropriate times, but never happy, I confessed. Yes, you do that, Chris said.

My love life was a juggling act between Mark and Skip, I loved them both and had different experiences with them, but it was really the same: Mark was having a hard time dealing with the death of his ex, who ODed, and Skip was still living with his ex, whom he thought he still might want to be with. I remember wishing they could just be present with me, here and now, but I guess it's hard not to drag all those past lives around with us.
In essence I think I saw them as life preservers; something to grab onto as a way out of the sea of drugs and booze and self pity I felt I was drowning in. It's one thing to grab onto someone and say help me, than to just grab and grab and keep grabbing.

I did manage to find some fleeting moments of peace of mind, when the chatter in my head, fix you life! get better! want to live! was quelled, when everything was perfect, usually in the dark quiet moments in the early morning when I woke up next to Skip or Mark. I prayed for the second hand to stop moving, wanting as much time with them at that moment I could get.
I also found those moments on Sunday afternoons, when I lay in bed alone reading for hours. Catcher In The Rye, Boy Wonder, the liner notes for Louder Than Bombs, a story about City Of Joy, the new version of The Stand, to name but a few. I dreamed about having the power to create the worlds these authors created on paper a reality. I wanted to create a perfect world I could walk into and never leave, if I wanted.

I walked many many miles that year I lived with Cath and Chris, sometimes it would take me hours to get home. (I've always been kind of antsy) Hours and hours spent in my head, wondering what to do with my life, knowing I needed to make some changes, again, but not sure what or how. The grip I had on my life was getting harder to hang onto, and the siren call of let go was getting harder to ignore.
My lease was ending soon, and I didn't know where I was going, but I knew if I wanted to let go, it would be better to live alone...

Time off from the rain.
the beat goes on.

It's All In My Mind

2009-10-14T20:33:00.014-05:00

Tony had a quiet presence about him, as if he were made of marble, or a statue found in Tutankhamen's tomb, come to life. I sometimes got close to him to check if his chest was actually moving up and down. He was tall and thin and still, and moved with the slow grace of a redwood swaying in the breeze. His presence also had a timeless permanence to it, like all the extra comet dust floating around space was gathered up just to create him.
Was he on drugs, or naturally this way? I asked myself one afternoon in Berlin. We were meeting the other Tony, Tony T, to talk about a fashion show he was putting on- Tony was going to model, I was going to present an outfit.
As we chatted, I realized this was the first time I had spent time alone with him, and it was a little overwhelming for me.

What is his deal? I thought, as we made small talk. Is he depressed or serene? I asked him questions to gauge where he was coming from, without directly saying it, because I didn't know him very well then. We talked a long time that afternoon, in 1991, and I came to the conclusion he was either wearing his eternity on his sleeve, or just plain tired.

The fashion show was a lot of fun; I had my friend Siobhan model a pre-Gaga football girl satire ensemble. (Lady Gaga is a cute weird dresser, but I like Roisin a little better...)
I bejeweled and spray painted gold metallic a set of football shoulder pads from the thrift store, gave her a bee hive hair do instead of a helmet, and paired it with bright orange stretch pants, the word 'hell' sewn to her butt, in big floral letters. Of course she played on Hell's team. To top it off, I gave her a Jewel shopping bag to carry down the runway, as an homage to Wickie-Poo, because no matter where I ran into him, he had on an amazing out fit that turned heads, and elicited jeers. I hope Renee has a picture of it laying around somewhere...

Life with Chris and Cath began pretty well, but I soon grew discontented with our arrangement. I guess I was at the start of my search for a life without drugs and alcohol, but didn't realize it at the time, and I couldn't bear being in the apartment with them very much, between Chris' all night mini drug parties, and Cath's wake and bake-edness (rhymes with nakedness). They drove me nuts because I wanted to be doing what they were doing all the time. Don't get me wrong, I was no saint, and I kept up with them, but only a day or two at a time. I was yet again around 24 hour party people, and resenting their abilities at it. I knew my addictions enough to know I couldn't hold down a job if I partied like I wanted to, and begrudgingly only went out a few nights a week.
So to avoid them , I got up early and went to a coffee shop on Broadway, aptly named Coffee Chicago, and hung out a few hours before work started, at one pm. (It's where Joy's Noodles is now. I spent countless hours next to that brick wall...)
I can't remember what I did for all that time, besides drinking tons of coffee, but I must have read books. After breakfast I walked the fifteen blocks to work, which took me an hour or so, and after walking back to the coffee shop after work, I stayed til close, which was midnight. I liked the nights there better, because they played old movies in a side room. A cup of coffee and a movie for a buck? Not bad. The kids who worked there got to know me pretty well, but I wasn't in the mood for any new friendships, I couldn't handle the ones I already had, so I kept to myself for the most part.
Friday nights were the worst. I had to be up super early to walk to work, to not drive in with Cath, because her smoke wouldn't kick in until we got to work, which was too late, for being with an unbaked Wake and Bake on a Saturday morning is just about the most dreadful way one can start one's day.
Chris' sounds of a party trying to not make a sound in his room, kept me up for hours. Then, just as I fell asleep, his ex showed up drunk on our buzzer, pressing it a hundred times, begging to be let in. No amount of threats or swearing ever dissuaded him from doing it again the next week. Maybe that's why he gave us so much free weed. That stuff was amazing. I had never got anything but paranoid from it in the past, not from lack of trying, but this guy's stuff became my reason for living. One puff and it was hours of happy laughy time. I seriously considered turning my life over to it, and did, for that whole year.
On the weekends, I went out with Renee and we'd do normal things like go to the movies or karaoke, and going to Scoozi or Hat Dance, and brunches at Queeny Mark's place in River City, and tea dances with the Berlin gang.
BUT, if Renee wasn't around, I hung out with Chris and Tony, and their scary friends. Their friends are just a blur in my memory, just a flash, because of all my consumings. I don't mean Chris's old friends you can still find at Berlin. I freak out a little when I see them, for they are still together, tied in their forged familial bonds, all these years later.
No, these people were scary in their commitment to ruin. Hour after hour, drug after drug, it was too much. One night the Mark I was dating was with us, and the next day he told me a the guy hosting the party turned to him and said, in a horrid monotone voice, with a shit eating grin on his face: Soon, very soon, most of the people in this room will die. And you wanna know why...? Mark was to afraid to say anything. Because of the decisions they are making right now...
Mark was so perturbed by that guy, he wouldn't be around him again, even thought it meant a free party. He'd ask me if the You Wanna Know Why Guy was going to be there, whenever I asked him out after that.
Mark, I'd say, that freak always has that look on his face, his brain is fried. He's a mess. Don't listen to him.

But no matter what happened that week or over the weekend, Chris and I would wind the night down together, sometimes with Tony and Cathy, by watching movies on Cath's VCR, her super-expensive early Eighties gift from her dad VCR. Usually the same movies: Female Trouble and Glen or Glenda, and/or Desperate Living. We had them all memorized, but we never tired of them. I guess it always helps when you know somebody else has it worse off than you, and no one had it worse than Dawn Davenport...
No one knows suffering like Lana Turner! (I think that's from Polyester)
I was just looking at the list of movies from 1991, and Chris and Renee and I saw so many of them in the theater, I can't believe it. How did I find the time or energy? None of use could stop talking about My Own Private Idaho, we really loved it, and Whore made us laugh our ass off. (At the funny parts. Or Theresa's blunt performance. I'm not sure which.) To this day, whenever I see a limo, I assume Theresa Russell's in there, nonchalantly working a three way.

Tony, Chris & Renee, 1991
vcr

A Promise to Be Found

2009-09-29T23:09:00.013-05:00

Tayler walked into the apartment a wreck. She was crying, and her face was a smear of snot and mascara and lipstick. Her leggings were ripped at the knees, where some blood trickled, and under one arm was a smashed cake box.
"Tayler, what happened?! Are you hurt?!"Ava and I shrieked. (Well, as much as two could shriek, who had been hitting the bong all morning, anyway.)
"Some bitches robbed me! I'm alright, I guess. I got off the train at Sheridan, and they came out of no where and pushed me down at took my purse and ran off!"
"Oh man, on Easter?!" I said
"Yea. On fucking goddamn Easter. Here's your cake." Tayler said handing over a smashed mess. "Ooo, it smells good. I'll get some forks" Ava said.
"Dammit! Where's the bong!" Tayler yelled.

Sometime in early '91, Ava moved in with Chris and I, and I was right, our new solidarity kept us on the right track for a while, and we didn't indulge in night life activities as much as we had been. Chris found a job as a receptionist at a salon on Belmont, B Vamp, where he earned the moniker Pancake, because he was in his compact every two seconds, reapplying. I was loath for him to work there, for I still hadn't forgiven the B in B Vamp, for his jumping on my back and trying to ride me like a pony, not once but three times, bombed out of his mind, at the Midwest Beauty Show, in 1989.
"He was probably just excited being around so many hair stylists." Chris said, laughing.
I pushed those feelings aside, however, when I saw how well they took care of him there, and when I kept hearing the tails through Chris of how much fun they had everyday, I debated applying for a job there.
My work situation turned into one headache after another at the time, and I dreaded going there, and complained to whoever would listen, but I hadn't the nerve to quit. If I hadn't been working with Erin at Neo that year, hosting Sunday nights, I'd have lost it.

Soon after Ava moved in, we had a party. A 'get to know each other's friends' kind of party. I hoped it would be better than the one I threw for Erin for her birthday, when three people showed up- I told you no one comes to my birthday parties because there's too many Christmas parties going on, but thanks anyway! And not as good as the last one Scot and I threw, where I had sex with Skip after I broke up with him, in Scot's room, after barracading the door, not realizing there was some else in the room, who, it turned out, didn't want to leave. Yes, not that much fun, but not too little, either. In all honesty, if I hadn't pictures from the party that night, I would not remember it. I guess that's good.

My relationship with Mark was slowly fizzling out, and turning into a friendship, and that was bumming me out.
I liked sleeping with him, and wanted to continue our affair, but the night he wriggled out of cuddling with me, while watching Silence of the Lambs, only allowing my temple to rest on his thigh, I realized it was over.
It should have ended the night I realized I was in bed with yet another h addict with an inferiority complex, yet I kept going back to him for a while, because he told me he liked to smell his sheets after I spent the night, because he never smelled anything like it. When I told him I wore Dali, he bought some, too.
He lived by a Green Line el stop, in and old carved up mansion, on the west side. It was one of the few residences left in the area at the time, stuck in a corner, and easy to miss; the once grand homes of the 1880's giving way to industry in the 1950's, and to the street walkers in the 90's. Despite the fact the entire building was surrounded with a chain link fence, the building and their cars were constantly broken in to. I hated spending the night there.
When I couldn't sleep for fear of a midnight murder, I snuck out of bed and smoked in the living room, quietly lit by the blue Italian lights strung on the wall, next to the drafty front window. This was early winter of '91, and I watched the snow fall on the empty lots across the street, and on the unused factory buildings across the other streets, everything stained a piss yellow by the street lights, annoyed by the silence of the car-less road, wishing I were stoned, and wishing there were vitamins in cigarettes; I felt so unhealthy lately.

That was a habit I started at an early age: staring out at a snowy landscape at 3 in the morning, cigarette in hand, wondering how my life got so fucked up, and fighting with every fiber a desire to be normal. Ahh, the introspection winter inspires in me.
I was in a handstand and cart wheel phase at the time, and my constant gymnastics annoyed him, which wasn't hard to do. (I am the oldest of five boys, so I know how to annoy, and he was bullied by his older brother. It made for an interesting combo at times...)
I sat at his typewriter and typed, over and over, ala The Shining, S-T-E-V-E-N, P-U-S-H-O-FF. (Ouija Board is my favorite.) We actually used the Ouija board in his place, but I did not like who I met doing that, so we only did it once.
Mark was a great story teller, and a brilliant writer, but he wouldn't believe me. I often thought to myself, Does he think I'm dumb? Does he actually not believe he has a gift for writing?
We sat together in many dive bars, and divey gay bars, and downed a lot of scotch, and talked about writing and art til all hours of the night. I still have the e.e. cummings book he gave me.

Speaking of Morrissey, I have Rene to thank for rekindling my love of him. One night driving in her car, she played a mix tape, and The Boy With The Thorn In His Side blew up in my brain, and I cursed myself for ever doubting him. Oh God, I gotta get some more of this! I said to her. She also made me fall in love with Pet Shop Boys and Vivaldi.

One Sunday, Ava, Chris and I realised we were about to get the tattoos we had been discussing for the past few weeks, on the same day. Tranay, who was a friend of Ava's, talked us all into getting inked by the man she worked for, Guy. His newly opened studio, Guilty and Innocent, was across the street from our apartment, and we debated for weeks the designs we wanted and finally chosen: Chris, a belt of vines, Ava an art deco figure, and me, a Sphinx. We each were present at some point during each other's tattooing, Ava's being first that day, and the sight of all that blood dripping down her white back, gave me pause. I had no idea how much tattooing bled!
When it was my turn, they walked me across the street, stone cold sober, as Tranay suggested, and stayed a few minutes, before leaving me alone with Guy and The Best of Blondie. Needless to say, tattooing is very, very painful, despite what you've heard, and I had an out of body experience the entire time. Guy did an amazing job transforming my tiny picture of an idea into my tattoo, and I regret breaking the creative spell he was under, after I saw what he had started to do free hand, outside my design idea. It was just too painful to stay under the needle any longer than I had to.
I didn't know how Chris kept going back to get his tattoo completed after Guy started his that Sunday, because his was around his entire waist, and required many hours, and mine was finished that night.
I still love my tattoo, and whenever I look at it, I'm reminded of the permanent ways our friends can change us, despite the passage of time, distance, or death.

At Ava's party, 1991:
Tayler & Ava
Tony & Philip
Yours truly
Rene, betwixt Scot's artwork
At Erin's party, 1990:
Scott & Erin
Me & Erin
Scott & Scot & Rhine
Neo, 91
Guy's card
Kiss Them For Me

Life Without Buildings

2009-08-28T19:49:00.009-05:00

The scene opens with a long shot of our hero with his head lying on his folded arms, asleep on his desk, in front of his active computer monitor. Zoom in. You can tell by looking at his rumpled clothes and scruffy face, he's done this many times before. In fact, he spends most nights here sleeping, if you can call it that. As his brain crawls it's way through as much REM time it can get, the computer monitor flashes an endless parade of images and stories related to the object of his search, his raison d'etre. He's read them all, they barely scratch the surface. His months of searching only reveals what he already knows: not much. He hopes his vigilance will yield better results. He hopes if he stays at his computer twenty hours a day, he might find what he's looking for. He hopes if he closes his eyes just for a second, he might find some peace. And the object of this search? If you saw The Matrix, you might guess Morpheus. If you knew our hero, you'd say a pink rhinestone bracelet he bought at Kohl's in 1984, that he just knows is lurking somewhere in a sixty piece 'buy it now' jewelery lot on ebay...

Chris and I floated around our large, sparsely furnished apartment for a couple months or so after Scot left, like two drunk ghosts, before Cathy moved in. Our place was so empty, it reminded me of the many 80's videos set in a smokey, fake street at night, newspapers caught in the wind. Or sometimes, it would look robbed. We'd come home to find our few possessions left askew, everything seemingly rifled through. When you did as much drugs and drank as much as we did, you got used to your life looking like that. We kept our couch and TV in the dining room which was next to the kitchen, and left the living room empty. We hadn't the money to furnish it.
Rex's curtain was still up in the dining room, from when he stayed there, when Scot was still living with us. Chris' friend Tony stayed there for a while, too, after Danny did. I forgot how many glamorous and wonderful people lived behind that curtain.

Looking at the curtain, I often thought of the night, we all were there. Rex, Danny, Scot, Chris, Tony, and I had a little pre-party before hitting the clubs, and went to "Danny's place". (Rex had moved out and was just visiting.) We lay on his futon, dreaming about our futures, sharing some sad stories from our childhood, (Tony in particular; his parents kicked him out at a young age for being gay.) smoking, drinking, and laughing, but there was someone else there with us, unseen. We all felt it; we knew this was a special moment in our lives, all of us coming together like this. It was a cold night in December, yet we were together and warm and safe- I think we knew that we were in the presence of people who would be there for each other when we needed them. We also knew on some level this would be our last night together as a group: in two years, two of us would be dead.
But that was yet to be, and Chris and I tried to go on with our lives as best we could. For me, Scot's moving was the latest in a long line of friends who had left Chicago, and I felt lost and overwhelmed. The life I began creating for myself in 1985 when I moved to Chicago had crumbled around me. And if my friends hadn't moved away, we moved in different directions with our lives, and that can be just as distant. I knew we still cared for each other, but we weren't building our lives together any more.
I became, as much as I could, the stable person in Chris' life, and helped him save his money, made dinner and breakfast when I could, and scolded him when he 'kept the party going' in his room with bar friends til daybreak. I say as much as I could, because I knew this was the role Chris wanted me to perform for him, and I was up to the challenge of the part of a responsible adult, but my coping mechanism at the time was drugs and alcohol, and I easily dashed any amount of respectability I managed to build for myself, and joined Chris in his all night binges.
My irresponsibility came to a head one night after a particularly close K call, and one too many out of body experiences bearing witness to my shocking and embarrassing behavior.
"Oh Christ, what am I doing- put down the straw and put some clothes on??!! "
Chris' actions started to disturb me, for his life seemed to turn into one long continuous binge, and I didn't know how long he could keep it up. We would get into these long talks about his behavior, like I did with Brad, and one day I learned he was an accomplished trumpet player. I begged him to go back to music; to make his life about that, something other than partying. I told him having my hair career and hobbies gave me something other to focus on than going out, and I told him about the friends I knew that hadn't anything else, got into trouble or ODed.
He just looked at me, as you would a child who asked you why the sky was blue.
"It just is, honey."
He would then describe his plight to me, that he was a 'victim of himself'. The damage was done. He was resigned to that idea, no matter how much I pleaded to the contrary.
We needed another person to live with us, and I had someone in mind, and I hoped Cathy's motherly instincts would kick in, and help me help Chris...

Chris & Roxy, above
twentysomething, and hating it, 1991

Left To My Own Devices

2009-08-24T21:17:00.003-05:00

Once upon a time, I did so much laundry with Todd, I can't help but think of him every time I do mine now, in my murky 1910 basement.
When I was sixteen, I lived down the street from him, and during that summer of '82, I bore witness to his every waking moment. Happily so. Like Tonto, or 'the Professor and Mary Ann', I was never center stage, but enough for a supporting role, in his story. Yes, Todd saw himself as a star. He was beautiful after all, with his bright green eyes, curly blond hair, and quarter back's build, and he loved the attention it got him. He transformed himself into the role of a 'star' from the one he was forced into as a teen: that of the town pariah. If you grew up gay in the 70's, chances are you know what I mean.
He lived above his landlady Bernie, who smoked despite her oxygen tank, who would shout quit smoking Brian! whenever I passed her door on the way up the stairs to Todd's. I would smile and nod and wave.
We walked the few blocks to the laundromat lugging his baskets. (Both the Laundromat and Bernie's house have since been torn down.)
We would talk about guys we liked, and school, and I would help him shake the lint and wrinkles out each piece of his wet laundry before it went into the dryer.
"Doesn't it all get smashed up in the dryer, anyway? Doesn't the lint trap catch it all?" I would ask.
"I don't care! Every piece must be shook out!" He'd reply.
Todd was a few years older than me, and starting culinary school, and I envied his independent life, and asked myself internal questions about my own, as I watched him live his. Would my life be like his, after high school? What will I study for a career? Where will I live?

His apartment was a little threadbare and depressing, with it's greying white paint and bare bulbs. The few pieces of furniture were clean but over used, and cheap when it was new, in the sixties. Littered about were hand me downs of hand me downs, small attempts by his mother and sister to add a sense of home. But it was his.
To cheer the place up, I painted him a picture of Marilyn Monroe, based off of a photo of her with Carl Sandburg.
Todd was often overwhelmed by the demands of school, and cursed his plight, and instead of studying, ran out to the gay bars every chance he got. He eventually ran off to Colorado for a year with his boy friend Opey, so he could quit school without listening to the wrath of his family, who payed for it.
I moved out of state later that year to finish high school, and watched, through the letters he wrote to me, his enthusiasm for Colorado, and Opey, wane.
Todd's is a long story I hope to tell in more depth sometime, but hopefully you get an idea of him. I don't know if it's Todd's or Bernie's ghost, or just my imagination, but as write here in the Viceroy, and breathe deeply, I get the distinct waftings of their old Memorial Drive duplex. I mention where I am right now because I am meeting two old stars of my story from the eighties, tomorrow for lunch. What, it's only been twenty years since I've seen them?!

Now why did start telling you about Todd? Oh yes, because I saw him as a kind of mentor, and I studied his life as a way of figuring out my own, and that reminds me of my state during 1991. I hated I hadn't a person in my life like Todd, because I had no idea what the hell I was going to do with me life any more. I felt so stagnant and stuck somewhere I didn't want to be, but I had no idea where to start changing.
So when Erin asked me to co-host eighties night at Neo with her and Carlisa, I jumped at the chance. I was nostalgic for a life yet lived, and went back to the past to live for a while. I knew the answers to any question about my life back then, and I basked in the warmth of old news.
They were fun, crazy, drunken nights, and we dressed up to the hilt. Neo is where I got my first taste of performing on stage. We paid homage to our idols by lipsynching to their songs to a mostly disinterested audience.

At the time, my past had little comfort for me, but it was all I had, so I stuck around...

At Neo 1991
'Nona Hendryx & Boy George' at Neo
'Nina Hagen & Boy George' at Neo
Disinteresting: Boy George
Disinteresting: Nina Hagen

It All Started With a Phone Call From Brett...

2009-08-10T22:32:00.004-05:00

The following is a guest post from my friend Sarah, about her infamous night with Bowie, in 1990. If you would like to guest star on my pages, please do... send me a story. Scroll down in a few minues for a new episode from my saga...

It all started with a phone call from Brett. Around 5pm Saturday, he rang me up wanting to know if I wanted to go to the Bowie concert. The concert was in Tinley Park. We had no tickets. I had already seen Bowie twice. This was not a do or die sort of situation for me. My response was not positive.

However, after some momentary cajoling by my smooth talking friend I had agreed to drive from my parents’ North Shore home to his parents’ Northwest suburban home and then to Tinley Park to see David Bowie.

As we had a bit of a time crunch, I rushed about threw on something…well, I don’t remember what I wore, but let’s assume it was black, and I was out the door and on the road in my recently received college graduation present. About an hour later I was in Brett’s kitchen when realized I had made a tactical error. “I forgot to stop for beer,” I said.

Brett began rooting about in the family fridge. Much to his teenage brother’s horror, Brett emerged with a box of white Grenache. “Man, they’re going to blame me!”

“It’s okay,” I soothed, “We can replace it.”

Somehow, someway we got to the arena before the show had started. We pulled into what was by now a very short line up for the parking lot. A fresh faced college kid asked me if I was going to the VIP lot. “Yes,” I answered and we were directed to a three row strip of blacktop near the arena entrance. After parking in the front row, we downed a glass of the white Grenache and made our way to the box office.

Two women were in line before us were asking for theatre seats. The ticket agent was valiantly trying to locate a pair but could only find two seats with an obstructed view. The women began to debate the value of these seats versus sitting on the lawn. My friend jumps in and says, “I was here last week for Depeche Mode and had seats behind a column. It sucked! You’re better off on the lawn. Really.” Did I mention Brett had the velvet tongue of a con artist? A moment later the women were moving away with their newly purchased lawn seats in hand.

Brett leapt to window and said, “We’ll take those two seats.” The agent said she’d try and see if there was anything better and typed away on her keypad. “I have two seats in the tenth row,” she smiled.

After stopping for a couple giant beers, we found our way to our awesome seats. Bowie rocked. We sang and danced. For a short time life was good for two recent college grads with no job prospects during the recession.

When the show ended, we climbed atop the hood of my car and enjoyed a couple glasses of boxed wine. VIP parking does not mean VIP exiting so we hung out there looking at the moon and chatting. At some point we began to refer to ourselves as Ron and Carol. I think it was the cheap, warm, stolen wine talking. During our conversation, I casually mentioned that I knew where Bowie was staying. One of the other Planned Parenthood volunteers knew somebody in security at the Ritz who was not all about discretion and had told her that the Thin White Duke was in residence. Upon hearing this tidbit, Brett jumped up and said, “Let’s go!”

An hour or so later we were on the Gold Coast and had secured a miracle parking spot in front of Holy Family. With no more of a plan than “Let’s go” in our heads, we made our way to the Ritz where we waltzed past the doormen and into an elevator. The doors closed.

As we stared at the floor buttons not knowing what to do next, the other elevator occupant, a woman, said to us, “Are you looking for David Bowie?” Seeing as how one word kept working for us that night, we said it again,” Yes!”

“He’s at Buddy Guy’s. I’m a producer with CBS and I’m doing a story on Buddy Guy. Adrian Belew is there and so is Paul Reiser [the comedian]. Phil Collins is rumored to be coming, too.”

We thanked the woman for the information and hightailed it back to Holy Family. Now, we had to have a discussion. I had four dollars in cash left. Brett had an Amex. Would this be enough to get us into the club?

We shot over to the south loop and secured yet again another convenient parking space. Approaching the doorman, I asked, “What is the cover and do you take Amex?”

“Two dollars per person and we take Amex,” was the bouncer’s answer. I don’t think we hugged him but we should have. I unloaded my cash and we entered the bar. Brett went to get beer and I headed towards the stage. A woman was sitting up front and I noticed she had empty seats at her table. “Are these taken?” I asked. She shook her head no and I sat down just feet away from where Buddy Guy and Adrian Belew were jamming on guitar and Paul Reiser (I know, Paul Buchman) was playing the piano. Off to the side of the stage, in a roped off area was David Bowie. I was in love.

Brett found me and took his seat. The woman at the table noticing my fixation on the former Ziggy Stardust said he’d been singing earlier. She started chatting about how she’d just like to talk to him. I said, “He wouldn’t have to talk to me. He could just point.”

Bowie never did get up to sing again that night but Adrian Belew was on fire playing with Buddy Guy and Paul Reiser (really) was doing a fine job on the piano so it was well worth the $4.00 and Amex charges. Phil Collins never showed up but I really didn’t miss him.

Sometime after 6AM, I was back in bed on the North Shore rerunning the night through my head til sleep took me.

Five years later, Brett and I had a huge falling out and we haven’t spoken since. Regardless of what actions ruined our friendship, I’ll always be glad he talked me into going to see David Bowie that night and I hope he feels the same way.

Here Comes The 21st Century

2009-08-05T21:53:00.041-05:00

When Scot moved out, in January of 1990 -no, wait, '91. He moved in 1991. I'm on a new year now. I told you all about my 1990: New York, London, gun shots, being slutty, etc. There are some stories I haven't told you about yet though: Rhineland, Mark, a good Ronnie story, the party I threw for Erin, or the night I almost died buying Boy George records. I'll tell you those sooner or later...
So in 1991, I needed to get a stereo, because Scot took it and his TV with him.
For me, music comes first, so Chris and I went a few months with out TV, til Kathy moved in, now that I think about it, and brought hers. I had somehow managed to trash the stereo system Jody bought for me in the mid-eighties. Too many nights coming home drunk and "accidentally" kicking it, I imagine. It was very compact, like an end table, and I kept it on the floor near the front door. I knew that was a mistake.
I wanted to be a modern, a hip and now, and to buy a CD player, but a whole new stereo system was more than I could manage at the time, so I settled on a CD boom box. I loved it. I had that thing for years.
Erin drove me out to the suburbs to buy it, because she said I could get a better price out there, so I bought it in Elmhurst. My first CD was a Boy George single for One on One, which sadly, I sold on Ebay a few years ago for movin' money. (And oh yea, I hope you like Boy George, because my story is going to get very Boy Georgie for a while, because of Renee.)
I hated to replace that player- all those memories and cool stickers, about to take up space in a landfill. (Where else are you going to put stickers?)
...All those nights coming home from work and turning it on, only to have it blast so loud I jumped out of my skin.
This is how loud Chris plays this thing when I'm not here? I'm surprised we haven't been kicked out of here yet. I thought to myself.
...All those hours spent with my boom box and Listen Without Prejudice, I Do Not Want What I Have Not Got, Kill Uncle, ABC's Up, You Can Dance, Anarchy in the UK, Louder Than Bombs, Def Dumb and Blonde, The White Room, but to name a few.
I bring this up now because I just got my replacement boom box in the mail, for the one I replaced my first one with. I guess a new one every ten years is pretty good. And my new one has an MP3 wire, along with the very necessary cassette and CD players, so I'm still a modern, even though I'm dragging a lot of the 20th century along with me. I happen to like the 20th century. My old one has this great sticker I bought at the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin in the nineties, and I hate to part with it, so I will try to pry it off.
(I just saw this sticker story in NY Mag, and it got me on a kick. I lifted this one recently myself, because I passed it for months whenever I ran in the park, so I took it to put on my fridge to remind me to run. I call it A Viking Wants To Blow You.)

When Tony introduced me to Renee one night in Berlin in late 1990, we acted more like we were long lost friends than two who had just met. Almost like we picked up where we left off. We went to Berlin that year for Halloween, the bar, not the city, and she said she was coming in costume. I hadn't made plans to dress up, but when I saw her walk in the door, I wished I had. She drove for an hour from the 'burbs as Laura, the dead girl from Twin Peaks. Plastic wrap and all. Now here's a girl I can relate to! I thought to myself.
"I want to marry you!" I told her. "Right now! Let's drive to Vegas!"

The year before, Scot put a personal ad in the paper, to meet a guy. Back then, people mailed responses with pictures in care of the paper, and they then sent you a big envelope of replies, if you were lucky, a small one if you weren't. At first they had put his 'I'm a skater boy looking for love' in the boy meets girl section. Oops. The best reply, other than the one from the 'I'm a jeans and lace kinda gal', was from this cute Asian girl, Oyster. I begged him to respond to her, just as a friend, but he refused.
When the next batch of replies came, it took us hours to sift through them all. There were dozens. A letter at the bottom of the pile caught my attention most. It was short and to the point, and came with some great photo booth shots.
"Wow Scott, I want this guy!" I said
"You can have him. He's not really my type."
"Alright!" I said
I never did respond to him, for he sent the letter to Scot after all, and I forgot about this event until one night I was sitting in my boyfriend's kitchen, and a light went on.
I remembered back when Scot and I were looking at the letters and pictures from the men who wanted his company, and I saw a guy in a photo booth, I wanted him so much, I felt like I time traveled to the future for a second, just a second, to take a peek to see if I would ever have him, almost like I was cheating at the game of life, and turning to the back for the answers.
"It was you, wasn't it! Last year, did you respond to a Reader ad from a 'blonde skater boy', and send him a photo booth picture?" I asked Mark
"Umm, yes? How did you know!"
The night I met Mark at Berlin, in the winter of 1990, he was leaning against the wall, wearing a black motorcycle jacket with a Soviet t-shirt, tight blue jeans that accentuated his long legs, and his gorgeous ash brown hair tumbled down his forehead, obscuring one eye. He was so beautiful and perfect to me, and I was so afraid of him, so extremely terrified, that I ran right up to him and introduced myself, and not out the door. This is exactly how I initially felt about all the guys I cared about and loved, in my past. Sometimes, in spite of myself, I make the right move.

Debbie the Hobo

Wrong b/w In Sympathy

2009-07-20T23:23:00.010-05:00

I finally figured out what my problem is: to write, I need to read. I had that long dry spell from posting, because I hadn't been reading. Well, I read a little. I finally finished that book I bought in Paris last January, at Shakespeare and Company. I bought Paul Auster's New York Trilogy only because it was affordable and had great graphics, because the store is pricey- great, but pricey, and I have to read before bed. I really liked the book, and took my sweet time reading it.
Then life gets in the way, and takes up a lot of my psychic energy, and head space, and there's only so much to go around.
So now, because I want to get back writing, I'm reading two books: Kafka's The Castle, and Touching From a Distance by Deborah Curtis, both of which amaze and transport me instantly into their worlds, so I pass that along to you...

Michael, or Lady My Kill, as we used to call him, used to show up at the most annoying times. Either early in the hung over mornings, chain smoking and eating up our kitchen, or just as we were about to go out, killing the voyeuristic mood we liked to lapse into. By 'we' I mean Scot and I.
My Kill's was the threat that we used on each other to motivate out the door: If we don't leave now, Lady My Kill will show up, and you know what that means!
That meant loud, grating acid trips. If he was on acid, which was usally all the time, he wanted your attention, and to scream in your face. Scot and I are pretty mellow guys, and have very high pain thresholds, unless we were drunk, so his presence was a little much sometimes. A lot much, often, actually. At first we tried to scare him away, by lying to him and saying we were going to church before we went out, or the police station (he was on acid after all) and when that didn't work, we'd lay around in our underwear, trying to act weird.
Alas, nothing scared him, and even though we told him his behavior was difficult, and to call before he came over, which he did for a while, we eventually accepted his presence, for I think we were the only stable people in his life.
He did have a pretty funny Boy George story:
Hey hey Brian Brian Brian!!! Did it tell you I saw George on a bridge one night in Paris, and I screamed at the top on my lungs HEY BOY GEORGE, YOU'RE A FUCKING BITCH!!!
Which he then did, in my apartment, for effect, I suppose.
What did he do? I asked.
Nothing. He said.
I looked at him and thought It must suck to be famous.
Lady My Kill got his act together a few years later, and started taking the right kind of drugs, you know, the prescribed kind, and went to hair school. (There are a lot of kids out there who went to hair school when they made the decision to do something constructive with their lives, and I can't help but feel a little responsible for that. Did I look like I was having my cake and eating it too? You be the judge...)

As I told you earlier, I met Renee just as Scot was getting ready to move away from Chicago. He said he was leaving because he didn't make enough at Medusa's to live off of, and didn't get enough support from his friends, but I think it must have been more than that. Chris, his on again, off again, was back in the picture.
Chris and I hit it off well, and we subconsciously, and consciously, fed each other's self-destructive habits. Watching two people you love live so destructively crushes your soul after awhile, especially when they claim to' just be having fun'.
Scot never did the things Chris and I did, but I do remember us having many pep talks with him, after that confession, about giving a good job interview, and believing in himself, because he was (and is) so incredibly talented artistically.
I know! But I can't talk to people! Why can't I talk to people! He would answer in frustration.
Because you're an artist, Scot. You don't tell, you show. Show people how great you are. I said.
Looking back, it took special people to see his abilities, and many did (I think his Medusa's job was a two day gig that lasted a year: they quickly saw his talent.) His biggest mentor was Nunzio, but when he died and Orbit closed, it hit Scot hard, and it took him awhile to recover.
Chris and I let him go with our blessings; we let him go where he needed to go. I wish we could have given him more, but we barely gave anything to ourselves as it was.
Chris moved into our dining room, and then into Scot's room after he left. It was a cold and deary day as we packed up his moving truck. Chris and I hoped he'd change his mind, but as he drove away, our apartment, and our lives never felt so empty.

Scot, in our Sheridan Road apartment, Chicago, 1990

Wrong

In Sympathy

Fire Walk With Me

2009-07-12T22:03:00.007-05:00

OK, yes, you guessed it, I'm obsessed with David Lynch.
And here's a playlist I made for you. It's guaranteed to put blood in your stool, you'll dance so much you will...
Fritz Conrad Sumer '09 Mix (sic)

Anywho, I was looking through my concert ticket book, looking for more events from 1990 to tell you about, when I came across my stubs for Bowie and Soul Asylum, both of which I went to with Chad. I thought nothing happened to me in 1990, but I was wrong: everything happened to me. I wrote about Chad last year, when I sent an essay to a Morrissey fan site, and then posted here, hoping to win free tickets for the 'best Morrissey memory' or some crap, which no one 'won', for I doubt it was an actual contest. Cause I would have won! God, I'm bitchy tonight. Oh well.
That was a great story, (Found Found Found, June '08) and Chad and I had a great time, and you should go back and read it!
Well, in 1990, we went to Bowie's Sound and Vision tour at The World. We were in the last row, yet the show held us mesmerised from start to finish. For us to finally see our long held idol, well, words can't describe it. For me I think it was seeing Boys Keep Swinging, on Saturday Night Live, and it was love at first sight. I recently found a clip of him on Johnny Carson, from 1980, performing Scary Monsters, and an amazing restyling of Life On Mars, when Johnny held up a copy of that album I gasped a little, cause it was like watching him wave a dildo around, that album is so gay to me. My gay. It was the soundtrack to my secret gay 1981 love life. And there's Johnny, waving it all over TV, for America to see. (And I still have my dog-eared copy Roy Carr's book, if you want to see it...)
Watching Bowie interact with himself via video image sizes here-to-for unseen, was like watching him breathe life into his past and present personas. Weird validation. Well, it was more than that, he had very elaborate interactions with his pretend self. I guess most artists do, and feel eclipsed by their 'image'. It was almost like his own version of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. This clip gives you a pretty good idea.
Soul Asylum was at Metro that year, and I went with Chad because he asked me, but I didn't really dig them til their Somebody to Shove days. For whatever reason, I decided to dress really gay, just to see what would happen. Nothing did. I did that for Gallon Drunk at the legendary Lounge AX, much to their dismay, cause it was like me and 8 other people there. They were fan-freakin-tastic. Nothing to note at Soul Asylum except the show seemed sparsely attended, as well. I think I 'gayed it up' at Gallon to upset my date Mark, who was easily disturbed back in those days. I couldn't help myself!
Now I have to tell you about Mark...
um, later.

Writing this story reminds me how much I have digressed from my original plan of telling you more about Renee, and another story about a movie I saw with another guy I dated then, Skip.
He invited me to see a movie, which I now have to spend a million years searching for, because I forgot to save the link for it a couple years ago. Hold on sec... OK I found it, and it only took me a Frankenstein!
Alright, the movie was Poison, and we saw it at the Music Box, but we weren't alone; we were with a friend of his. I didn't like the movie at the time, for I thought is was just as it's title implied; a conceptual poisoning of homosexuals in a heterosexually dominated media. These were the days of the corporate American sponsors of Thirtysomething threatening to pull their ads is they dare show two men kissing during prime time, after all. That may have been the director of Poison's intent, for he was 'out', and maybe he needed to clear the cinematic slate, as it were, and declare these stories 'poison', and go from there. I dunno. But my diatribe on this topic made Skip more and more upset, if the look on his face was any indication, for he begged me with his eyes to shut up and take the movie for the pieced of fluff he thought it was. I was trying to upset him because I could tell he was sleeping with this guy, and I wanted Skip all to myself, and he was dropping me off, getting rid of me, after the movie to be with this guy, and I was mad. Mad right there on Sheridan Road, in front of my apartment building, by Broadway, in 1990. (Imagine a picture of me pointing to the spot his car sat, my eyes moist, with a quaver in my voice...)

Drowning In Berlin

2009-06-29T11:38:00.003-05:00

On Friday nights, in the fall of 1990, I would often lounge on my couch and chain smoke, and watch the planes heading toward O'Hare as they floated past my window, and contemplate the flight patterns, while watching The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd or Twin Peaks, or whatever the hell was on TV back then.
London... Tokyo... Dallas...Las Vegas... LA... Paris. Another plane, another city...You want me to where next week? Cairo? Oh, alright... I would think to myself.
This was a few months after my trip to London, and boy did that trip ever create a desire in me to travel more. For months afterwards I would stop and stare at a plane that was headed away from the city, wishing I were on it, being excited about the new land I was about to discover.

One night that fall my lazy day dreaming was shattered by the sounds of gun fire. My first instinct was to get low, for it seemed the shooting would never stop. When it did, I crept up to my balcony door, even though my apartment sat way back from the street, and just as I reached the door, I saw some kids running down Sheridan, away from another kid pointing a gun at them.
There was then, as like now a rash of gun violence involving young people and guns in this city. I remember the entire family, kids and all, shot execution-style, a few doors down from where I lived; a crime that was never solved. I also remember around this time a friend's son being shot across the street as well, with a shot gun, behind a fast food restaurant.
I found out later that a no one died that night, but a teenager was shot in the spine, and lost his ability to walk.

In the fall of 1990, I met Renee. Tony from Berlin introduced us because we were standing next to each other one night, and he pointed and said Hey! You love Boy George, and you love Boy George! You should talk! And we've been friends ever since. I think we took this picture the night we met, for I rarely, if ever, ripped in half a photo booth series. You had to really beg me back then. They are polyptychs, you can't break them up...
Of course, having just met George, I told her the story, and it became a thing: I had to tell her the story every time I saw her. Not that I minded, of course. We spent many nights at Berlin in those early days, torturing Dion(now in LA)or Bobby (now at Crew) into playing way too many Boy George vids, to the point when the moment they saw us together, they put one on. God love 'em! We eventually moved on to other musical obsessions, Suede, Pussy Tourette, Annie Lennox, Belinda Carlisle, Lush and Shakespeare's Sister come immediately to mind, but this 1990 '91, and Jesus Loves You had just come out, and we couldn't hear it enough.
I was spending less time with Erin, because she moved out of the city for a while, and we didn't get together like we used to, but I was still spending every Sunday night with Scot at Berlin and Christopher Street and Vortex.
I loved our walks to the bars, and looked forward to Sunday nights with him; the bars weren't as crazy as they could be on Saturdays, and I liked the mellow vibe of a Sunday night out, when we had the dance floor nearly to ourselves for hours at a time. The S'Express days were waning, because he told me he couldn't afford to live in Chicago any more, and was moving home in January.
It took me a while to understand how deeply his moving affected me, and the deep sense of loss, so I guess Renee came into my life at a time when I needed her.

Oh, and as promised, Wigs of New York . And I hope to God you listened to the title song. Go to Amazon and buy the CD! You'll thank yourself for years to come...

You're Gonna Need Someone on Your Side

2009-05-21T11:36:00.005-05:00

Erin knows why that song is there, & More memories of Central Park:

Erin and I trekked through Central Park, one sunny and cool December afternoon, in 1990, following a trail that wove through the trees and shrubs. The trail appealed to us because it was so organic, so in contrast to the cement rigidity of the city, and we quickly forgot about the mad rush of life, a few yards away. Though I had been living in Chicago for the past five years, and couldn't imagine my life any where else, I still felt the undeniable pull of nature, and the need to wander the woods, as a periodic cure for the city. (After 24 years in Chicago, that pull to nature is long gone, but I now live by a park that reminds me of Central Park, and being there somehow draws me to New York and High Cliff.)
During out respective childhoods, Erin and I spent a lot of time in the woods, and I guess the surprise of finding a good chunk of nature in New York was a novel, welcome surprise. Before long, we noticed we had a guest with us during our hike, who picked up the pace when we did, and soon I remembered where we were, and this guy probably wanted more from us than our company, so I grabbed Erin's hand, and dove off the trail. Oh yea, Erin said. We're in New York!
As we wandered the more populated trails for the rest of the day, we finally found the Alice in Wonderland statue, and we got caught up in losing the sense of time and place, as only Central Park can do, and near sundown, we came upon a large group of still, quiet people. We looked at each other in wonder. As we got closer, we noticed the group were all ages and races, and many of them were crying. We looked at each other again. Curious, we crept closer to what looked like the focus of their attention. Below our feet, we saw the large circular memorial for John Lennon, strewn with flowers and lit candles. Maybe someone was playing Imagine on a radio, maybe some were softly singing that song, maybe both.

This is the tenth anniversary of his murder. Erin said. I was in school, in Spanish class. I said. I was in English. She said. Let's go back to 15th Street, and buy some wigs! I said. (I'll post those pics later.) On our way out, and after completing almost an entire loop of the park, starting near 70th street, we heard the faint refrain of Pennies From Heaven. Walking closer to the music, we sat on a bench near a lake, near the man who was playing his own version of the song, over and over, on a boom box, as he gazed at the water. Being tired from our long day of walking, we sat hypnotized for dozens of playings of Pennies From Heaven, as the water danced on the rippling lake.
Then we bought wigs....

The Caves of New York III

2009-02-24T14:21:00.008-06:00

Sorry, sorry, so sorry for the two month break from my stories. I've been writing a play, auditioning, acting, getting ready to act, and helping a sick friend, to name but a few things going on in my life these days. And change. Change, change, fucking change.
I'm very excited about my play, but with all my piles of notes, I'm a little afraid I'm turning into that dingy looking guy at my library, who I see slumped over his scribbled-on note books, taking up the whole table. Piles and piles of dirty spiral note books, containing God knows what- madness or a master piece. Is he another Darger, or just a guy doomed to write down every random thought that comes into his head.
Maybe some day I'll ask him what he's writing.

Erin and I went to New York together in December of 1990. We stayed with her uncle, and his wife and two young daughters, in their condo in the Village.
Erin knew of my love for New York City, and I carefully planned our trip- mainly what clubs on what night.
My first trip to New York, in 1980, started at the World Trade Center, so I felt all trips should start there, so I've brought many friends down town over the years as an introduction to the great isle I love so much.
On a bench in Battery Park one early eve with Erin on that trip, watching the colors of a fading day reflect off the Statue of Liberty, I thought about how much my life had changed in the past ten years; it seemed if I squinted just right, a lot of my dreams had actually come true. And I was happy. But I was always happy in New York.
One night at her uncle's, were getting dolled up to meet our old friend Rex at his place, as the girls watched, among their toys, non-plussed a boy was putting on make up, on their bed.
Her uncle is a painter, and had applied his art to all the doors in their loft. I hadn't experienced such a spare home before; there was nothing but art in their living room, and a lone chair that hung from the ceiling. Well, there was also a large collection of shoes by the front door, for the big rule of the house was shoes off!, which Erin and I found funny and annoying, but if you have ever spent time walking the streets of New York, you could concede the point.
Despite it's minimalism, their home had warmth and a heart, due a lot to the art work, but also to the two little girls, and the frilly, pink clutter they can't help but attract.

Before we left for Rex's, and a night of debauchery, they insisted we go with them to see 'the real Santa', at Macy's. We took the bus uptown, the girls leading the way like we were in their backyard, off to see their club house.
This was my first time in Macy's, and the line to see Santa was amazing, scary, and fatally long, and thank God there exists the brilliant and now classic story David Sedaris gave the world, about his experiences there. Read Santaland Diaries, if you haven't! Who could have ever imagined the humor, pathos, tragedy, and human drama lurking under all that fake snow...
I begged off the three hour wait, and let Erin fulfil her auntly duties, to Christmas shop. I remember buying Scot an Andy Warhol coloring book, and getting a scary comment from a teenager on the escalator, about my twenty dollar Canal Street Rolex.
We finally met Rex at his pre-war apartment in midtown, which he shared with a friend, living the classic New York life: tiny apartment, huge wardrobe. At this moment in 1990, fashion was Gaultier, and they even had the necklace of his I had seen in The Face.
We went to Save the Robots, where the vision or a giant roomful of pink plastic pig chairs is forever burned into my memory, and where we met up with one of their gorgeous friends. He was the type of beauty you couldn't help but gawk at. He was like every guy in high school I ever had a crush on, all rolled into one.
I sat on a plastic pig imagining kissing his perfect feet, (he wore sandals in December!) until I was caught, and my only punishment was his wry, knowing smile.
Oh, to wield such power... I thought to myself.
Erin and I ran out of money, and went to a bank lobby ATM, on our way to the next club, where we met a woman who lived there during it's off hours. Hoping for a tip, she guided us through our ATM experience.
Erin promptly treid to help this woman change her life, and gave her some money under the condidtion she promised to go to social services.
People never really try to help me. She said. Thanks for trying.
We met up with Rex and his gang at an after hours club, where he put our names on the door. I remembered the name of that place until about five years ago...
For me, going back to the cities I'v visited over and over, as the years go on, is a little like going to Knoxville, and expecting the World Fair to be there: I miss all the old haunts. The Brain, The Saint, all the Junior stores... Thank God museums don't close; they are like old friends to me.
At this after hours club, Erin and I lounged bored at 4 am, in the vip room, surrounded by most of the people we thought we left back in Chicago. The only highlight was watching a fawn-like barback try to sneak a punch bowl filled with God only knows what, and attempt to flee before the crazy hoard caught a wiff of the free 'booze' and pounced on it like pirhana on a clumsy rabbit.

The Caves of New York II

2009-02-14T23:27:00.013-06:00

I went to New York in 1990, to visit my friends Danny and Ronny, but also to see if I still wanted to move there. I had gone ten years earlier with my family, to see some of downtown for a day, for we lived in Connecticut at the time, and many memories are forever burned into my mind from that trip, but when I saw the 'basement' of the World Trade Center, as I called it, and it's city beneath the city, my first thought was I want to work here!
During the eighties, I lived mainly in Wisconsin and Chicago, and I spent most of my free time fantasizing about New York and London. I read all the magazines that centered around the parts of the cities I craved, mainly night clubs and fashion, and I saw myself living in one of the two one day.
When 1990 came and went, and almost all of my friends moved to New York, I wondered why I still lived where I did, and what my life was going to be about, now that the eighties were over.
I spent most of that decade in gay bars and night clubs, and never questioned my place there; I was still a kid after all.
For me, the eighties were: DIY! Androgyny! Drinking! Buying records! Drugging! Sleeping in the hallway cause my ride left! Sleeping in a stranger's bed! Sleeping til 3pm! Burgundy hair! Dancing to cool songs with cool people! Spending every second with friends! Starting fashion trends! Having enough money for the bars! Catching as catch could! Partying all night and all day and still looking great! Running all over town acting queeny and getting into trouble! Not caring if I paid my bills! Running up to the edge of disaster, again and again!

But at 24, none of that seemed important to me any more. It seemed childish. Bars and clubs were starting to bore me, probably because most of my friends were gone; they were either gone or falling down the drug rabbit hole, and into worlds I wasn't ready to visit. Work was going from bad to worse, and I hated every moment there. Did I hate working? My job? My career? I didn't know. I spent many many long long hours thinking about what the nineties were going to mean to me, bumbling, stumbling, hung over mornings, and bleary afternoons thinking Now What? Now Where? Now Who? Now Why?, wondering those questions, not asking them, desperate and worried, while wandering around my apartment, and the streets of Chicago.

Back in 1990, after my visit to New York, I knew I was ready to move there. But when I was back in my routine in Chicago, I would always change my mind. I have given myself the gift of living in a city. I thought to myself. I live here.

Danny and I spent our time together running around New York, going to the Met and the MOMA, having lunch in the minuscule Bagel next to his apartment, shopping in Soho for cheap club wear at Canal Street Jean and on Canal for fake Chanel t-shirts and jewelry, hanging out with Pat Fields at her store and buying up the place, visiting Bonnie at her rent control on St. Mark's, (God, the past lives that seeped out of those walls!) across from the 'anthill' as Danny called it. It was a large recovery house, with many doors and stairways, that indeed did resemble an anthill, when it's inhabitants endlessly crawled all over it. Later I found out that building was The Dom during one of it's incarnations, where Warhol filmed the Velvet Underground. At night, of course, we went out. I only really remember being at the Palladium with him on that trip, and the Monster. We had so much fun getting ready to go out, the actual going out was secondary, because I didn't have him all to myself any more.
He was fighting with Ronny during that time, rather Ronny was fighting with him, I think Ronny was jealous of him, and he wasn't speaking to him anymore. They were living together, sleeping in the same room, but not speaking. When Danny wasn't around, Ronny would tell me how his new life in New York was, which reminds me, I have to do an entire post on Ronny sometime soon. He was pretty amazing. He was glad he had finally moved there, and found a great salon to work for, and encouraged me to move there, too, as he dressed for work. His clean and simple outfit of white jeans and a white dress shirt and a blue bandanna dew rag became a favorite look of mine for years after.
On my last night in New York, Danny and I went to the Monster. It's a local Village gay pub, with dancing in the basement. The week of partying was starting to get to us, and we dressed down for the occasion, and had a more subdued conversation while we got ready for the evening. I was a little shocked by this, because Danny never dressed down ever, that I could remember, and he looked great in his preppy college kid clothes. He said he started to realize the kind of guys he attracted when he was dressed androgynously were not the kind he wanted to spend more than an evening with, let alone have a relationship. That simple act of changing the way he presented himself to the world, told me he was starting to change his priorities, too.
He kept trying to get me to talk to this guy that was checking me out, and we hung out in the basement til they closed.
"But Danny, I want to spend time with you! I want to talk to you!" I said
"That's OK, we talked enough- just talk to him! See what happens!" He said.
The bar closed, and we went to the bodega by his place, to get some junk food, something we did often back home. Well, who was in the beer aisle but Mr. Monster Guy, so we talked a little while. After a few moments, Danny joined the conversation, as we completed our purchases, and walked onto the street, where we parted ways with Monster Guy.
"I'm proud of you, Brian. You did something you are usually too afraid to do."
And that, as it turned out, is a good way to describe my experiences and life in the nineties...

NY, '90

Blind

Same Old Scene

A rare imix for you to enjoy. Rare cuz I flames on the Apples.

The Caves of New York

2009-02-05T22:58:00.013-06:00

I am obsessed with the year 1981. I spent hours today on Pocket Calculator trying to remember which Walkman I had. My best guess is the Sony WM-3.
I should say which Walkman Brad gave me. He bought it off a kid in Milwaukee for 25 bucks, that's way over a hundred in the store, bro!, during one of the times he ran away from home. I can't believe I ever got rid of it. I hate myself for getting rid of stuff. I think that was the real reason I was so attracted to King Tutankhamen as an eight year old: listen to my voice...be like me and keep your shit forever!....
(I got that game for Christmas in 1974. I distinctly remember seeing my brothers and step dad frolicking in the Christmas Day snow through the window of the dining room, wanting to be out there, too, but unable to tear myself away from my new game. I can't go.....The Mummy is talking to me!!...I am finding it really hard resisting pressing that Buy It Now button...)

I've turned into an archaeologist of my own life. Via the computer, I dig up all the things I lost over the years. This week alone I got three Bowie Scary Monster records in the mail, and I await with baited breath the forthcoming email from ebay telling me I have the chance of bidding on a WM-3.
I do still have some original things of mine from 81, but sadly, only a dusty few. Why do I want this stuff back, anyway? 1981 wasn't that great of year for me, at all, but I guess the few times it was good, it was really good, and I want to remember, in the fullest detail possible, those memories. Old things can trigger memories for me, even though I'm unearthing another's possessions. Some things from '81 I miss, and don't know where to start looking: my pink Antonio t-shirt, that red shirt I bought from Chess King, the Debbie sun glasses I got from the back of Rolling Stone, all the clothes Brad gave me, the silver bracelet my mom gave me for Christmas, my Cortez's, and the folders I drew on in high school. I roll these things over and over in my brain, almost like I'm trying to force them into reality.

I was in Paris a few weeks ago, where I made Bronzino Man II, (Don't get me started on him!) and what did I find on my Louvre map but a little box that said Proust's Bedroom. All the air went out of my lungs. I ran up there, cursing my cheap little digital camera, (a camera I plan on keeping forever, btw) to bask in Proust's things.
Hands shaking a bit, I asked the female guard where his room was.
Down that hallway she said as she pointed, a little startled at my enthusiasm.
If I had wanted to, I could have snuck in and sat on his bed, security was pretty lax. I contented myself with a lean over the velvet rope barricade, to look into his mirror, and I 'accidentally' brushed my hand up against his chaise lounge.
I could be very comfortable here. I thought to myself.

In 1990, I went to New York City twice. In the early fall by myself, and later that winter with Erin. When I went alone, I stayed with Danny and Ronny at their new apartment in the Village, just off Sixth Ave.
Eyeeeeee love New Yooork! Danny would sing out the window, across the street to the Pink Pussy Cat Boutique, despite the rancid cooking smells seeping up through the walls, from the half dozen restaurant smoke stacks that surrounded their apartment. Because of that, to this day, walking past a restaurant can gag me out. They lived on the 8th or 10th floor of a building devoid of an elevator, which was newly renovated, and a good size for New York. Unless you have a lot of money, New York apartments are comfortable only to first graders.
This was my first trip back to New York since I was there as a teenager with my family, ten years earlier. I was a little upset with myself for missing the eighties in New York; missing Warhol and John Sex and Basquiat and Keith Haring, and the Peppermint Lounge and Mudd Club and Danceteria, as well with missing London in the eighties, so I cranked up my Party Monster-Odometer full blast, and I set out to leave my mark on Ninties New York.

Leaving my mark on New York started with breaking a dildo. A Jeff Stryker, no less. I know what you're thinking, you're thinking Wow! He broke a Jeff Stryker! But it wasn't like that. Well, it was and it wasn't. I was using it, but not using it, when it broke. I'm not too sure I would ever want to meet the person who could actually use it, if you know what I mean. It was their other roommate's, whose name I can't remember right now, let's call him Ken, it was Ken's dildo, and I threw it unwrapped in the garbage can. I could have died.
Of all the things to break! A giant dildo! No one will ever believe I broke it by not using it! No one! They'll all think I'm a loosey-goosey! I will never live this down! Now I have to buy Ken a new one, and those things cost a fortune! I can't afford a new Jeff Stryker!
Those were the thoughts racing through my head as I walk into the Pink Pussy Cat. So rather than let Danny and his roommates think I'm a dildo-clepto, and feign innocence if someone were to ask where the Jeff Stryker was, Where the hell is the goddamn Jeff Stryker! Which one of you bitches has the Jeff Stryker! I admitted to them what had happened. Ken didn't ask me to replace it, but he said did freak out when he lifted the lid to the trash can, and saw a gigantic disembodied penis laying there.
If you are so inclined to Google a picture of a Jeff Stryker phallus, you have to find a picture of someone holding one, to appreciate it's size. It's a little like that scene in Aviator, when Howard Hughes realized you couldn't tell how fast the planes were traveling in the clear blue sky, for his movie Hell's Angles, because they weren't moving past something. I need clouds! Give me clouds!

Danny and I went out to the clubs every night; the Palladium, the last night of Save The Robots, Pyramid, and the Monster. The Palladium was a gorgeous old building, with a fun week night party at the time, and I mainly remembered how extreme some of it's patrons were dressed, I thought it was performance art. Performance art walking around a huge, empty gallery. Palladium is mammoth, and needed thousands to look alive. We didn't stay long; just long enough for Danny to break up with an 'annoying' friend.
What is going on with you two? I asked him, as I saw his friend storm off in tears.
I told her I didn't want to talk to her any more, and she kept saying 'What have I done to get this kind of treatment from you!!' He said, and laughed.
I pretended to laugh with him, and asked, So Danny, when is it my turn?

come back later for Caves of New York II, and probably III.

r.i.p., Lux

Paradis

Without You I'm Nothing

2009-01-22T23:16:00.008-06:00

1990, Heathrow:
I stood in line waiting to check in for my flight home to Chicago, when I hear loud, Beatles on Sullivan type screaming.
During this time, England had a rash of terrorism, and the subways were plastered all over with posters asking you to 'pay attention to unusual packages or behavior', with two large big-brotheresque eyes staring out of the walls. Those posters freaked me out the most when there were so many people crowded into the narrow, snaking, underground hallways, you couldn't even stop if you wanted to, let alone try to pay attention to anything other than getting where you needed to go, and not swept away with the crowd. I tried to avoid the tube during rush hour.
So when I heard the terrifying screaming, coming from my right in Heathrow, I braced myself for flying debris, and looked for a place to dive for cover.
I slowly turn to my right and see about thirty eleven year old girls, charging full tilt boogie in my direction. The screams were screams of joy; with smiling faces their arms strove for the their target.
What the hell? Who are they screaming over? I think to myself, as I look to my left, where I spied a New Kid. Ooohhh.
He feigned that he was less than thrilled at seeing this tidal wave of fandom headed his way, and pretended to look for an escape route, when he saw us bleary eyed travelers glare at him for disturbing our early morning peace.
In the nick of time, his body guard appears out of nowhere to smack the kids away like he was trying to put out a fire. His rough behavior didn't hamper their enthusiasm, and each girl tried their best to get their arms around their idol.
The woman in line behind me asked aloud, What I want to know is how they knew he would be here!
After a minute I turned away and thought meh... Now if that were Joey...

John and I went to see Sandra Bernhard's Without You I'm Nothing on the 3rd of July, in 1990 together, at the old Fine Arts Theater on Michigan Avenue. He lived down the street, so we walked from his place, and who did we pass on our way there but Joey the New Kid himself. I didn't scream, or feel a tingle in my loins, for he looked all of fifteen years old. I still have his doll, though, in my closet somewhere...

Without You I'm Nothing was the right movie for me at the right time for me. I went back and saw it a few more times before it left, with my friend Donnie, (who I wrote about a few dozen posts ago) who was now my co-worker Donnie. I'm not real sure why that was, because he made good money in the fragrance world, but if I'm remembering correctly, Consita hired him as a manager. I thought it was going to end badly, our working together, but it was a good experience, considering that any room Consita was in was a very small room.
We loved that movie, and could not get enough of it.
Sandra just made it look so easy, getting up there and making a movie off, what looked to me, her cuff. She truly inspired me to find that voice I had inside me, and do something with it. She had the novel ability of not putting her cart before her horse, and put it on celluloid.
Being with John, and watching that movie for the first time, I knew, despite the fact we were holding hands in the dark, I had no idea how to move our relationship forward, or where I wanted it to go. Now more than ever I felt ruled by what scared me, and not by what inspired me, and it was making me sick.
Ugh. It's sitting here next to me, it's up there on the screen; everything I am doing wrong. Now what. I guess that's a question: Now what?

Around this time, Scot and I were into making shirts. He had lots of extra interesting fabrics laying around from his job upholstering, so we made these kind of Shakespearean, over sized shirts in purple and pink velvet, that were just up to the edge of, but not quite, club kid. Well, Shakespearean on Scot, but more Kristina Holland-like on me. This was near the end of our crazy outfit days; the days when we would pull out all the stops and pile on the wackiness until we finally realized, even though it's tons of fun, fashion doesn't get you laid.
Also around 1990, 91, Michael Alig started showing up in Chicago, throwing parties in alleys and warehouses and laundromats and always with a dozen imported New York self-created freakazoids. They were really quite amazing to behold, their creativity seemed to know no bounds, and I would steal in dribs and drabs, bits of their look for my own.
Though I did find it odd that even though they would be flying on God only knows what, they took the time to protect their hearing and wore earplugs on the dance floor. When I saw earplugs in the guy with pipe cleaners glued to his forehead, I thought Is this his job? Does he think of this as a job? If this is a job, then who the hell am I working for?

One night at Berlin, Michael starts talking to me, as he did every time he saw me around town, and put me on his lists for his parties. Come on! Show up! He would ask.
I was being very strict with myself with drugs and partying at that time; it wasn't too hard, I wanted to be free of it for a while, and it felt good to be clean, and I went with it, and I think Michael liked that about me. I never showed up to his parties, even with promises of what ever I wanted being there. I never showed up because I knew those parties, I knew those people, and I honestly did not know that if I went to one of those parties, I would ever want to go home again.

Thank God Morrissey is still alive, that's all I gotta say about hearing the leaked copy of his new album.

1982, in a Wisconsin basement

I Almost Forgot Myself

2008-12-13T20:52:00.014-06:00

for sarah

September, 1990:
As I waited for the number eight Halsted bus, on the corner of Halsted and Armitage, I muttered a curse at it. I had taken that bus every day, twice a day, for over five years now, and I was sick of it. I was in the sometime habit of walking home to Sheridan and Broadway, about two miles away, but I wasn't in the mood this particular night.
After a few minutes, a cab pulls up in front of me and drops off a cute blond guy in a suit. He steps out of the cab, and instead of taking three steps to the curb where I am, he decides to sit down in the street. He stands up and sits down a few times, and I realize he can't stand up by himself, so I slowly walk into the street, and bend over to ask him if he wants my help with the three steps to the curb, and out of the street and away from drivers not on the look out for dudes sitting in the road.
Before I can get out more than a 'hey buddy', he growls at me, and sputters out: get the fuck away from me right now or I'll fucking kill you.
Whoa! ha ha, I laughed, as I threw up my hands. You got it, and I move back to the curb to wait for my bus. If I seriously thought I wouldn't have gotten bitten or worse, I would have helped him anyway.
The cars stopping at the light would either first look out their window at the guy in the street, and then to me, and gave me one of those I can't believe you're just standing there not helping him! looks, or rolled down their window and yelled at me to help him, where I would yell back: you try and see what happens!
No one, however, got out of their car to help.
I started to worry he would be in the way when the bus pulled up, and the bus driver would get mad at me if he had to get up and help the guy out of the street, and not let me on the bus. So I started to mentally and bodily nudge him in the right direction, as you would a bowling ball, whenever he made a wobbly attempt. After a few more tries he finally did it, and stumbled down Armitage I'm sure, to his doom. Or at least to a night in the shrubs.
Speaking of the CTA, I used the newly opened Irving Brown line stop, and saw the wonderful art work adorning the walls. Is it worth an extra quarter a ride? I guess so...

I was so into with John, once upon a time in nineteen-ninety. I loved how he looked at me when we danced together at Berlin, and the way his arms and shoulders moved, and the smile on his face. I was so worried about messing up my relationship with him, I totally messed up my relationship with him.
The first night I met him, in the summer '90, he invited me to the Belmont Rocks the next day to while away a Sunday afternoon with him and his friends. I was so scared, I begged Scot to go with me, which he did. We had a great time, the three of us, for his friends never showed, if they were even supposed to, and I grew more smitten. I watched as he lounged in the grass by the lake in his Calvin Klein boxer briefs, his tanned toes playing with the deep green blades, as we chatted and laughed long into the afternoon.
I could just look at him for hours... I thought to myself.

Gasp! you're wearing underwear out side, Madonna! I said.
Yea, so?

The couple times I went to his place on Michigan Ave, I desperately wanted to, but didn't, go to bed with him.
I think the long string of one night stands I was having that year prevented me from sleeping with him, and because I liked him so much, I wanted to take a slower, different approach.
The last night we were together, in his high rise condo, with the night sky pouring in like a curious voyeur, we were still wrapped in that glorious, fuzzy, rose-tinted haze of a new relationship, with the spell of our desire for each other still potent, seemingly indestructible, fueling us closer together. I felt it hanging in the air, as if we were laying in a room in the Louvre, and saw it on John's face like a drug; I couldn't believe it was desire for me.
I came closer and closer to laying bare my amorous intentions for him, but never did. I watched his desire for me that night fade away; never again was I to see imaginings of me on his face.
As the months went on from that night, I was to often run into John around town, always with a beauty on his arm, and a smile for me, but as the years went on, he had less good cheer, and almost a look of contempt for me, shading his brow.
Maybe he saw on my face what I still held unwavering in my heart for him, and he grew tired of masking his disappointment in me for never sharing that with him.

Doves

When I'm Up You're Coming Down

2008-12-06T23:51:00.015-06:00

for graeme

I know, it's not January, but aren't you glad to see me? BTW, that last post was my 100th. Hurray for me. Thanks for wasting time with me!

When she walked into the train car, on the tube in London, on that unseasonably warm day in May, all heads turned. She was stunningly beautiful, after all, with her peaches and cream skin and dark golden blond curls cascading down her back, bobbing like a willow tree in the wind, but she was also dressed in the height of fashion for the time, in 1990: Katherine Hamnet (or were they Pam Hogg) copper patent leather moc-croc short shorts, and matching jacket. Jaws dropped. I didn't know where to look first. And she just stood there on the train, a typical cool English beauty, like it was no big deal that she was a fashion magazine come to life.
Londoners wield special fashion powers. It is especially strong, and you always know when you are in their presence, and the designers notice too: The Brits invent style and trends, the French make it beautiful, and New York sells it. It was a special thrill to see them in the flesh, living and breathing as they trotted around town on my first visit there, and I hunted for them, like rare birds, and found them lurking in stairwells smoking cigarettes, gliding in pairs down King's Road, or flitting around nightclubs.
For me, it's like a great painting being suddenly plopped down onto the street; some people have the gift of presenting a complete and perfect statement, idea, or feeling with what they choose to wear. I stop in my tracks and stare, eyes bugging shamelessly, every time.
I guess that's the appeal of movie stars and movies. Breakfast at Tiffany's and Gentlemen Prefer Blonds never bore me, because the costumes are so beautiful.
Monroe, Crawford, and Audrey all knew how to dress, and the power of the right choice. Chloey Sevigny does it for me. (Cute blog.)
Also on this trip, I got to be face to face with one of London's biggest fashion icons, Boy George. Yes, I'm finally telling that story.
I was with my boss, Consita, at Limelight one night, and we somehow found ourselves in the VIP lounge by accident, because now we were on the other side of the mob of people, we had just witnessed moments before, who wanted in.
(Someone left the downstairs backdoor open. That place is a maze of rooms.)
And who is standing six feet away from me but George himself.
I was a little haunted by George during my time in London, for I so, dare I hope, wanted to meet him, or at least see him. I imagined seeing him just rounding corners, going up escalators, or getting into cars; always just out of my reach. I turned into my childhood friend Mary. She was my lonely, slightly slow neighbor, and a few years older than me, who constantly interrupted our playtime by running off to 'talk' to a 'friend' she just 'saw'. Thinking about her makes me giggle and breaks my heart at the same time. Is that possible?
I think it was the combination of her full and curvy womanly body, married with the mind of a girl, that made her junior high school peers shrink away from her.

George was a few steps away from me, and I wanted to run, but Consita had a better idea. She pulled me up to him and said Hi George, I'm Consita and this is Brian and we're from Chicago and we wanted to say hi! Perfect, right?
Hi! I'd love to talk to you two, so can you hang out for a minute while I finish talking to those two? He said, as he turned and pointed.
Love to talk tooo....??? I thought.
He was bookended by two of the most gorgeous men you ever saw. I'd finish that conversation, too.
By the time this happened, I was pretty drunk, for it was one of those I'm gonna get drunk tonight! nights, which was an unusual statement for me to make, because getting drunk every night was a given for me back then. I think it helped calm me down though, and helped me to act casual and non chalant, for I was tripping on some heavy Boy George acid.
When he came back over, he introduced us to all the people he was with, who could have been the Beatles and the Queen for all I knew, and bought us drinks from the giant stack of drink tickets in his hand. When I saw that stack, I immediately thought of Marilyn, and his Chicago Limelight performance: the rumour was the owner made him sing there, and New York, to pay off his huge London Limelight bar tab.
Yes, Mare, I could pay off your bar tab, but what lesson would you learn from that? I imagined George saying.
George's hair was cropped and magenta, and we were wearing similar outfits: black palazzo pants with a Gaultier t-shirt and blazer. My Gaultier blazer was borrowed from my friend Rex, It was a thousand dollars, so don't wreck it, and my t-shirt was Junior Gaultier, and I felt like a junior George.
We talked about his interview I had just read in i-D magazine, but he could talk really fast, and with that accent of his, well, it was hard for me to follow him, so I took dives into his amazing blue eyes. No wonder he's famous, look at those eyes, I thought to myself or said out loud, I don't know. Pictures don't capture them. Colour by Numbers comes close.
After a while, George slips away, with a promise to return, and Consita and I talk:
"Bea is going to be so jealous! George is so nice! I think he likes you! Can you belive it? Partying with Boy George!" Consita says.
I was still at a loss for words, but I knew I needed another drink, and left the way we entered, back downstairs. The door was shut, so I kept it propped open a bit while I got my drink.
Of course it was locked when I got back, and I spent twenty minutes trying to get Consita's attention from the other balcony, waving like a lunatic.
See. Me. Now. George. Is. In. There. See. Me. Now!
She finally saw me and snuck me back in, and we talked with George some more.
Do I tell him I can remember the first time I saw a picture of him? Do I tell him about the hours I spent dancing around my bedrooms in small town Arkansas and small town Wisconsin, pretending I was him? Do I confess to him all the time I spent looking at pictures of him, memorizing every fashion detail? I decide not to, for whenever I had the impulse to relate my experiences to him, I read in those eyes of his a look of knowing, like he could read my thoughts, and his desire to simply enjoy this moment we were having together.
I should have stopped drinking, but didn't, and by the end of the night I was quite wobbly, and George drifted away from me and down to one end of a blurry hallway, discussing me with a friend, while Consita and I tried to hold each other up, on the other end.
We stumbled home, back the the flat we rented by Harrods, and woke Bea with our news.
For days afterward, I floated around London with the power of I spent the night with George, and he liked me! keeping me two feet off the ground.

God's speed, George.

Lush De-Luxe

A Rain-Coated Lover's Puny Brother

2008-11-19T15:14:00.005-06:00

A story from 1987 follows...

"Brian, Michael's been calling you." Brad said to me one night.
"Michael T.?! How did he get this number?!" I asked.
Micheal T was a guy from our not too distant past, who reminds me now a days of Eddie Izzard, but with a language barrier. Eddie is hilarious, but if you grew up in China, you may want to avoid him, if you know what I mean. One night he finally gets me on the phone:
"I hear you and Brad have a place together! Can I come and visit? Can I stay at your place?" He asked.
"Um, OK." I say.
"What is there to do?" He asked.
"Well, I pretty much go to Limelight all the time and..."
"What! Limelight! How fabulous! Do famous people go there? Can we go there?!" He squealed into the phone.
"Sure," I say "there's lots of cool bars. Brad works at one you might like."
"How do I get there?" He asked. I tell him I live just off an exit from the interstate.
"Oh my God! I'm going to Chicago! I'm going to Chicago!" Michael screams.
I didn't hear from him again until the year 2005.

I've wanted to go to London for as long as I could remember. It wasn't til I met Bryan, who had been many times by the time I met him in 1985, and Robert, a 'Berlin' friend, who was 'going for the weekend', sometime during the summer of that same year, that I ever thought I could actually go myself.
I'm going to London for the weekend! Yea, just a few days! Robert said.
Moron. I think to myself.
How was London? I ask. Great! I just went for the weekend! He said. Idiot.

My boss at the time, Consita, really made this trip possible for me when she asked if I wanted to tag along for her class at Toni and Guy, in May of 1990. I saved for months, and had quite the sum when the day finally came.
I remember being in a panic, waiting for my taxi to O'Hare, I almost stayed home. But a powerful, quiet sense of 'everything will be alright' came over me, and I got into the cab. That feeling was one I recognized from childhood, and I trusted it.
The first few days I was on my own, meeting Consita and her friend Bea later, so I wanted to get off the plane knowing exactly what to do and how to do it. I studied the street and subway maps so thoroughly I practically had them memorized.
My roommate Rex had told me about an affordable B&B on Sussex Gardens, Hyde Park Rooms, and during my research I found there were many B&Bs on that street, so I decided to choose one once I got there.
Wearily stumbling in and out of several B&Bs on my first morning in London, I choose Hyde Park Rooms. (Still a great B&B and deal.)
Sussex Gardens and the surrounding area, Paddington, was unassuming and tree lined at the time, so the sounds of children at play echoing up into my shared and rented bathroom brought the city of London down to earth for me, as well as taking some of the air out of the whirling images of it's high fashion, mega night life glamour slinging around my brain.
It was hard falling asleep that first night, for I was overwhelmed by the actual achievement of my life long goal, and the British-accented reverberations filled my thoughts long into the night.
The first thing I did was go to Soho, for that's all i-D magazine talked about. My love for the ancient in London was in it's infancy, and my fascination for all things trendy and youthful was all consuming, and hard to miss in London, for the desire of young Britons to define their generation, in the face of so much tradition is pretty contagious.

I was a little Viv Nicholson, a little Spend! Spend! Spend!, and I loved every minute of it. Each morning I went to the deathly over priced currency exchange, because the guy was so cute, and I read in him an ever so slight urge to tell me of a more economical way to get some pounds, which he resisted. ATMs weren't universal yet, and I hadn't a credit card. Next stop was my tube stop, Paddington, by the long gone 70's era steak joint which, unfortunately, we ate at.
Eating was my main problem; fear of eating alone in London. Sadly, I was ostracized most of my Junior high and high school days, so you would think I would be over it, but when I talked to Rex about eating alone, he told me that was what he looked forward to the most when he was working in New York.
His words echoed in my mind during my first meal there, and by the next one, my fear was gone.
My first night in London, though being extremely jet lagged, I went to find Heaven, "under the arches", whatever the hell that means. I walked in circles for hours that night, til I ran into an Italian looking gay, and asked him if he was looking for Heaven. Not understanding his response, I moved on.
The next night I found it right away, but had a bad time. Heaven is huge, but no fun when you're alone. I was fascinated by the roving bands of club kids decked out in all white.
Wearing all white was a moment unique to 1990. I think it was a fashion statement saying the 80's are over; wearing all black is over, so let's start with a clean fashion slate. Most all the clothes I bought on that trip were all white.
For the next two nights, I decided to wait til Bea and Consita got to London to go out to the clubs, so I went to the movies. I saw Sweetie, the Australian flick that began so well, only to die a slow death, and The Krays.
The Krays! The Krays! There were posters all over the place shouting The Krays! Every time I saw that poster, I thought to myself, I thought those were the Kemp brothers...
I started to assume this was their new post Ballet gig, til I saw The Krays on a movie marquee. Oh, it's a movie...
I know you're thinking how can i be such a Morrissey fan and not know about the Krays; TLOTFIP, after all. I guess I just sang along to the chorus back then. (That boy was so cute. Whatever became of him...?)

More later...

Fighting the Fire

2008-11-14T10:27:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, everytime I looked at the road, all I saw were women smoking and driving. They looked orgasmic, desperate, and silly. I don't really have a craving to smoke right now, but I felt the need to tell you, and to tell you I'm working on a post, and it's turning into a three-parter. I think I may even post them all at once; you've been so patient...

Orphans

Bye for Now...

2008-09-29T00:37:00.004-05:00

Hi all. Sorry to say I have to stop blogging til the end of the year.
I'll be back in January of 2009 with more of these ancient stories...

Movies of Myself

2008-09-25T22:00:00.007-05:00

I have been avoiding writing about Danny. Yes oh yes. I wonder where he lives, if he lives, and what his name may be these days. I wonder about the decisions I made in regard to him, the things I said, the things I didn't. This giant tidal wave of questions and doubt and guilt and longing and love and concern wash over me whenever I think about writing about him, and it feels never ending, but I will just let it wash over me, and get it out of my system, and not try to fight it.
He is such an over whelming subject, as well. His story needs his own mini-series- my part of his story, anyway. For all of Danny's story to be told, we would need to resurrect a Russian novelist.

For a month in early 1990, Danny lived with Scot and me, before one of his many moves to New York. I wanted to tell you about my trip to London that year, because it's easier (emotionally), but I guess while Danny lived with us, those were the good times. The best of times.
The word that best describes Danny would be evolution. He was constantly evolving, pushing himself forward. He wanted to be better and purer and truer and as real as he possibly could; the most of anyone in the room.
This, of course, for anyone who knew him, was in direct contrast to what he looked like. He dressed, during most of 1990, like a five year old girl. I know that statement looks bad on paper, but I mean that in the best possible way. He pulled off dressing that way because he was so amazingly hilarious. He got the joke first,before anyone saw it coming, and he was already planning the next one, before you could catch your breath from laughing so hard.
He was also a natural beauty. Those pictures were taken later that year, after he moved to New York. Here's one of us taken while we lived together, at the club Cairo. We took many many many pictures together at the Berlin photo booth, but I would have to rent out the Guggenheim to show all those.
While we're on the subject of pictures, can I just tell you how obsessed I am with this Roxy poster? I know, the things around that poster are very exciting and glamorous, but I can't tell you that story yet. Just look at the Roxy poster. I think because my current apartment has a weird little angled corner like my 1990-92 one did, and I keep expecting to see that poster there when I pass it. Also, as I was digging through my pictures, I realised a lot happened in 1990, and I don't think I've said even one word about Ronny, so I better get crackin' with my story.

Danny and I spent every second we could together in the months before he moved to New York. We went out almost every night, Ronny and Scot usually in tow, we grocery shopped, we cooked, we jogged by the lake, we watched TV, and we spent hours getting ready to go out, but mainly we talked. He could talk a blue streak. So smart. Way too smart. He could turn into Jane Austin or Carl Sagan or Lenny Bruce or Sigmund Freud or Bobby Knight or Gladys Kravitz on the turn of a dime, all while looking like a hairy Madonna. And his eyes, I got lost in them. Like pure green crystal.
Every Monday we went to the Jewel on Addison, spending hours in the beauty section, while he explained how and why aliens would take over the world, why Scot drove him nuts, how Ronny sometimes scared him to death, and how truly excited he was to go to New York to be a fashion illustrator, as he reached for the last Cherries in the Snow, or a couple boxes of Little Debbies. (I wore Love That Red.)
His art was so inspired and beautiful and creative, I knew he would go far. I marvelled at his talent. I loved talking to Danny because I heard where he had come from, and all the difficulties and pain involved, and saw where he was now. He had worked it out. He did what needed to be done. He got it together. He was fearless and went after what he wanted, but most of all he moved forward. That is what I wanted most: to move forward from my past, to evolve out of the circles I felt trapped in. He was living proof it could be done. Every time I left his company, I did it with renewed resolve to get a happy life, striding off with confidence.
But his presence was a bit like Novocain; I felt like I could conquer the world when he was around, but when he wasn't: now what did Danny say I should do...?
I needed more more more Danny. I had to know his secrets to life; I had to know what got him out of bed each morning. So when he finally did move to New York, I wrote him every week, and read each letter a million times. I still have them. And because he took the time write me back each week, I started to think I wasn't a lost cause. I started to believe in myself, because he believed in me. That's all it took. His letters started me down a better path.
But only, to say yet again a phrase you must surely associate to me by know: for a while.

Link to title song. Play it over and over like I do.

Just Like a Prayer

2008-09-08T23:41:00.015-05:00

He kind of skipped along side me for a bit, and ran ahead, then glanced back at me before he took a right into the alley, by the laundromat that used to be off the corner of Sheridan and Broadway, where I washed my clothes in 1990. The kid startled me, and almost made me drop the magazine tucked under my arm. He was wearing clothes a little too short and revealing for the temperature outside, and how filthy they were was in direct contrast to his youth.
Then I saw the hole in his shorts. They were green gym shorts, not stylish at the time, and the hole in the shorts was right there, in that place, where his hole was.
Is this kid a prostitute? Or does he not know there is a hole in his pants? He can't be more than nineteen! Why would he do that? Where is his family? A hundred more questions raced through my head, as I sat down in the laundromat for a moment, my heart pounding, and breathing heavily, to process what I had just seen, and how I was feeling.
He flitted along, trying to catch the attention of men with wallets, but his soul was erased; there was but a mere sliver of humanity left in him; a mere sliver of willingness to carry on with the life he was living. I looked for him later, but never saw him again.
After a few loads, I picked up my Interview, and read about Madonna's famous dancers from Truth or Dare. The writer had way more fun talking to them then he expected, and the dancers flirted shamelessly with him: Your shoes should throw a party so your pants would come down! OK! High five! Her dancers reveled in who they were and what they were doing, and the author celebrated them as well. As if he had a choice.

The crowd tended to be a little rough at that laundromat, what with the Chateau Hotel across the street, so I usually hid behind Interview, cause it was so big.
Whenever it was that year Madonna came to Chicago for her Blond Ambition Tour, Scot and I were at Berlin one night, and Vogue came on the video screen. I turned to say something to Scot, and saw all the dancers from the video standing behind us, noses in the air.
Scot! Look at the video, and look behind you. I said. Oh my! He said.
We did that for the entire song, looking slowly back and forth from the video, to the dancers. We said nothing to them, and after hiding in the corner for a few more songs, they left.
The Like a Prayer album always reminds me of Rex. I know it should remind me of Wickie-Poo, but I was in Rex's boyfriend's car the first time I heard it, on cassette.
I liked Madonna a lot when I was in high school, in 1982, when Burning Up and it's video would stop us all in our tracks (yes, I went to gay bars during high school) and in '85, when she was on the cover of Spin, and was starting to be talked about for her lacey neon bra-strap ways, but I was rarely one to buy anything in the top 40. (Blondie being the main exception.) And by 1990, I did my best to try to ignore her, but that was an exercise in futility.
Rex was an ex New York model, down on his luck, who had come to be Scot's and my first house guest. Guest isn't the right word; he lived with us for a few months, in a curtained off section of our dining room. I think he came to live with us for a while because his life was spiraling a little out of control in NY, as it can for the young, reckless and beautiful, but I can't imagine how a section of our dining room did him any good. I hope it did. Rex was to fall into Scot's arms a few more times over the years, as Wickie did to me- I think there is just something about being taken care of by someone who likes and understands you.
Rex was still gorgeous and a lot of fun to live with, and he liked to fry up a pan of chicken livers every week, and he had great feet.
His feet are so pretty and white, like mine used to be. Why are mine so blotchy and red these days? I would think to myself, as I gazed at Rex.
He had an amazing wardrobe, because of his retail jobs and connections, and he owned nothing that cost less than five hundred dollars, seriously, but he paid little or nothing for it.
Oh, this is nothing compared to what I used to have, he would say, you know how club kids can be...
No...I said.
They like to destroy us expensively dressed girls, usually by slapping you with bubble gum on the dance floor, so they can make a clean get away. All that Mugler and Gaultier, down the drain. He said.
Oh crap! I said.
His favorite prize was his two thousand dollar croc Ralph Lauren wallet. Free. He was generous enough to let me, his alcoholic room mate, wear almost whatever of his I wanted out to the clubs.
Back in Rex's boy friend's car, with the cassette on in the back round, he had come to our apartment to pick us all up, Rex, Scot and me, for brunch at his place. His name was Tony, and he managed a 'classy' salon, and had the most beautiful condo ever. It was spare and modern, with a big balcony. Rex had lived in Chicago before New York, and he and Tony were on again, off agian. Tony reminded me of a cuter version of Marc Jacobs, with his deep, soulful puppy dog brown eyes, and had the quiet power of a sexy St. Francis, with his seeming ability to lower the blood pressure of all around him. He DJed as a hobby, and had a huge collection on vinyl along the wall, which Scot and I scoured through, making requests.
The food he made was wonerful, but all I could think about was Tony's life. The car, the job, the boyfriend, the home. He was living my dream. Well, not exactly my dream, but pretty damn close.
God, could I ever have this? The things Tony has? Will I ever be this person? Could I ever be this person? I thought to myself.
As he drove us home, we listened to Madonna's cassette again, and the next day I went out and bought one of my own.

title link

Wild at Heart

2008-09-08T23:07:00.011-05:00

That's a picture of me and Chris at Berlin, in Chicago, in the winter of 1990. He could really nail a picture. No, we are not wearing 'costumes'. That is how we dressed back then. And by 'we' I mean ennui laden, world weary, you-just-might-understand-this-outfit-in-ten-years, homo posers. Chris was a roommate of mine from that year, and I'll tell you all about that later, because I wanted to post that picture of Delhi I've been telling you about all year, because I finally freakin found it, while I was looking for my picture of Skip, which I now cannot find.

Delhi and I are at Limelight, in 1988, with the famous rocknrolla Johnathan in the backround, at work at his bar. I think that's the famous stolen Lipstick belt, though I thought I bought that a few years after that picture, and that's a t-shirt I hand painted from my childhood book of Egyptian stencils. Brad and Ron accused me of being a living version of the SNL skit of the Everything Store, for having a copy of that book: Do you have a chocolate crossbow? Yes I do. No I meant a white chocolate crossbow. Yes I do...as they liked to say to me over and over.
I would be embarrassed about the bleach splattered Le Chateau pants I'm wearing, if I hadn't just seen a picture of Galliano wearing the same pair in a recent Bazaar. Maybe he should hire me. (I also have a funny story about a JC Penny pillow case I wore as a shirt in 1980, that turned up in the first new collection from Balenciaga's new designer a few years ago, but more in that later.)
I found some pictures I took out my back porch in 1990: looking south on Broadway, at the sidewalk I spied Skip. Notice the lovely topiary at the gas station. We really cared back then. All those stores are gone. I think Barry's was there for like a hundred years. And looking north.

A sneak peek for the future, from my trip to London in the spring of 1990: a public phone booth card, NSFW!, a tart card, as they call it, advertising 'for a lady' (for as long as Photobucket will let me keep it there, anyway.)
They still have those kind of cards in the phone booths of London, mainly because they still have phone booths. A cult of collectors have sprung up around these cards, and I'm sure this one is worth thousands. Here's the card from Gaultier's Junior store in Soho, now long gone.
(Go to Soho, oh! Go to waste in the wrong arms... [at 3:40])
Finally, another modern London relic, this one from King's Road, the One to One bar. I'm 99% sure it's a Gap now, because I've spent hours trying to find it; it was in that mini mall, which is still there. I didn't want Consita to take that picture, because I was trying to look cool for the cute bar tender, and that's either Mrs. Clause or Blythe Danner to my left, I'm not sure.

Oh, and that guy in the backround, in the v-neck sweater, in the above picture? I slept with him.

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Moving Under Ice

2008-09-03T14:43:00.008-05:00

for Carl

Oh, those hung over late eighties Sunday mornings of my youth. Waking up to the taste of day old menthols and gin & tonics intermingling with the flavors of my post binge food of Little Debbies and Fritos. They were the highlight of the weekend. Scot was always up hours before me, and gave me 15 minutes before he headed out the door for Unique thrift store, in case I wanted to go with him.
That is, unless I succeeded in dragging my ass out of bed early enough (Damn you MTV!) for us to watch Just Say Julie together. It's funny, I don't remember craving coffee and food, and running to the kitchen in the morning, like I do now, but needing Julie Brown on a Sunday morning, and a thrift store in the afternoon.
On our walk from Sheridan up Broadway to Montrose, Scot would make fun of me by imitating my body posture: arms crossed and hunched over, and accused me of fearing for my life. Really, I was just in pain from all the previous night's booze. Well, maybe I was a little scared. It's still an 'interesting' area.
Even though we went to Unique every Sunday, rain or shine, Scot had to look at every single LP and 45 record they had. Every one. It took him at least an hour. And God help us if he was in a t-shirt mood, he would have to look at every one of those, too. Needless to say, I had to learn how to pace myself in the housewares, Cher, and shitty art sections.
Back in 1990, we were obsessed with all things seventies. That's all we looked for: knick-knacks, t-shirts, flared pants, dishes, purses, everything seventies. But what we wanted most were platform shoes, and those could be hard to come by. And not like the cock roach-brown, sad, single, laying by itself on the sidewalk like I saw in Hartford, Goodbye Seventies platform, nor a clownish Tequila shoe, but a sexy, hey, nice shoes, Tony pair. You know, like the ones we wore in third grade.
One Sunday, passing a shoe repair store, we noticed a sign that read "We Customize Shoe Height" and in the window was an example of their work. Their service was really intended for people who needed two different shoe heights, but we took a chance and asked him to "platformize" both our shoes.
Scot wanted Converse platforms, and I wanted wingtip. To our joy, the cobbler was more than happy to help us.
At first we were conservative with our height, but soon we remembered our brazen ways, and asked for more and more height glued onto our shoes.
Scot pushed the cobbler over the edge one day by asking him for three two-inch soles on each shoe.
"Oh no! Three way high! Three way high!" Was his reaction, but Scot won out.
I was furious I had to hear this story second hand, because he went on a day without me.
Scot has always had amazing taste in decorating, and he did a great job on our place on a shoe string. Everything in this photo was thrifted, save for the electronics. Everything. Yes, I know.
For his bedroom, he turned it into a mini version of The Factory, by making an industrial, four poster bed, and painting everything a metallic silver.
For me, I just needed my room to be cemetery-at-midnight black til noon, so that's what I worked on.

One night at Berlin, this cute guy started talking to me Hey gorgeous you here alone can I buy you a drink you wanna go out sometime? I actually did one of those turn and look behind me moves, cause this guy was that cute.
His name was Skip, and he was ten years older than me, and a weekend waiter.
He was one of those people then, as now, I think about a lot, because I learned so much from him in our few short months together. Oh, the stuff that came out of my mouth whenever we talked! It left his hanging open, and his eyes darting around for an escape route. A lesser man would have baled out long ago, but Skip knew I needed more than that from him.
I had no intention of telling you about Skip now; I tried think of another light hearted story from 1990, but sometimes, stories take a path of their own.
His is a painful memory or me, because I still crave his company and his touch, and the sight of him in his tighty-whities, even twenty years later. Sadly, that can never be, for he is no more, he is as dust.
Skip liked a public place for our (his) amorous actions, especially a parked car. Another place that stands out is the Three Penny, a long gone Lincoln Ave theater. I don't remember the movie, but I sure remember his 'enthusiasm'.
One Sunday I spied on him unseen as he walked up my side walk, on his way to my door. For the life of me, try as I might, I could not read the expression on his face. I took that as a good sign.
With him, I was the most open and honest than any other lover to date. He held my hand the night I confessed, through sobs, how I knew I was destroying myself, and I didn't know what to do about it.
After a while our meetings together became about conversation, because he was trying to get back together with the boyfriend he was living with.
Yes, his ex's emotional outbursts, of which he had no problem performing for me, me the other woman, were frequent and uncomfortable.
Though, I can understand why the ex screamed whenever I was around: Skip was someone worth fighting for. The ex won.
I think what triggered this memory of Skip was seeing a black panther TV lamp at the antique store recently. Black panther TV lamps were always Pavlovian for me, because one sat in his downstairs neighbor's window for years after I knew Skip. That's how he told me to find him, the first time I went to his place. Look for the black panther in the window.
In the late nineties, I had a feeling about Skip. A feeling he may not be around an more. 1999 was an odd year for me, for I had many unusual paranormal experiences. One morning I saw 'him' standing over me, for a brief moment, and I took it as a sign to find out what, if anything, may have happened to Skip. I debated knocking on his door, for I lived just down the street, but I knew the ex wouldn't want to see me coming round again.
Not long after, I saw the ex at a coffee shop, looking really really bad, and that only confirmed my suspicion.
So one night I was with my mom and aunt at the restaurant Skip worked in for years, and finally asked about him.
Yes, he was gone, and greatly missed, they said.
Yea, missed... I miss him too. I said

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Never Look Back, Never Look Away

2008-08-25T21:25:00.010-05:00

Well, firstly, sorry it's been a month since I've been here, and secondly, I met my Bronzino man. He's at the Met, so I must have seen him a half a dozen times, but I didn't know until last year I wanted to meet meet him... Oh, and thirdly, I saw What We Do Is Secret: not bad.

A story from 1984:
Charles always kind of scared me. He was the very definition of extrovert, from his over-sized smile anchoring his over-sized forehead, to his ever expanding arms. He wanted to scoop up as much of everything as he could with those arms; he was aways in outward motion. He lived out loud; he never down played for one second his big queeny ways. But what attracted me to him was his intelligence; the mind of a PHD lurked under all that fake tan and hyper stylish clothing.
I met him while I was in beauty school, and he was the manager of a chain salon in my hometown, in charge of a staff of twenty. We rarely talked shop, for I told him I was leaving Appleton when I finished school, and he believed me, and left it at that.
Charles liked to have fun. He liked to go out. He liked to drink. I know he liked me in that way, but never forced the issue. Everything flowed around us when we were together: the liquor, the laughter, the good times, he had a way of making you feel special and important and wanted. He encouraged outlandishness in everyone around him- it was the Eighties after all, and because of him my hair got bigger and purpler and more mohican. (Grant also had a lot to do with my style, but I'm saving that story for my book...)
I had recently found a great, deep blue 60's blazer, that went perfectly with my shade of purple hair, which was so expertly structured and fit me so well, no amount of brooches or rosaries or even a Mohican could distract from it's perfection. I wore that thing for years. I can't believe I ever got rid of it.
Charles encouraged outlandishness, but his enthusiasm for your style tended to turn into battles. Who could be the wildest? He always won: his clothes were the craziest and his hair was checker boarded six ways to Sunday in a new rainbow of colors every week.
But he was fiftysomething, and I was eighteen, so he decided after a few months of our little 'contest', to settle down in styleland somewhere between weird and freaky. To the untrained eye, he probably just looked 'gay'.

One night, early on in our friendship, he took me to the bar in a restaurant I had won a gift certificate for, to show me I had nothing to be afraid of.
I was afraid to eat there, because it was Appleton's nicest restaurant at the time, and I was afraid I didn't know what to do or how to act. Even though I was in the room before it was finished, on an early tour while they were constructing the hotel, it was still intimidating to me.
I first saw the huge boxes of books, and then the floor to ceiling book shelves that would be their home. Our buyer found these books all over England, my guide said, to create in the restaurant the feeling of and old English manor library. "Old English manor library restaurant"? What does that even mean?! I thought to myself.
I used to see the maitre d at our small town gay bar, always in his black dinner jacket and bow tie, standing off to the side, getting drunk, and looking like someone who was 'in attendance' to our (local gay soap) opera. He was from Green Bay.
I talked to the maitre d a few times, and he assured me I would enjoy myself, and said he looked forward to seeing me there.
So I was finally going to the bar at Christie's, with Charles. I of course wore my blue vintage blazer, and made my hair as big as I could, because I was going to the bar in Christie's, and that I knew how to do. Charles was waiting there for me, excited, because he wanted to show me something!, he said on the phone.
After a few sips, he unbuttoned his shirt to reveal to me and the entire place his new gold nipple rings, connected by a gold necklace. Oh Charles, button your shirt. I said. I never did use that gift certificate.

In 1989, while I was living with Scot, I was a slut. I can count on more than one hand (I think) the guys I slept with while living on Sheridan and Broadway, and to me, that's pretty slutty.
The first on this list was Brian (Scottish last name). I saw him last year sitting in a car with his mother right in front of my salon. I pretended to be engrossed with something on my desk, and occasionally stole peeks at him while he sat in his car pretending not to see me. I seriously thought about talking to him, but didn't. He still looked good, almost twenty years later, and I did enjoy our time we had together, but you know...
Back then, he lived on that street that runs parallel and south of Belmont, between Sheffield and Clark. I work near there now, and often walk down his old street, and what I remember most about him was his smell. It was great and unlike anything I've experienced since. I had a weird dream in his place, and turned it into a short movie when my friend Chad asked me to write a short for him for one of his classes, a year later. You may get to see it some day on Youtube, if Greg ever puts it up. I lost my copy of it years ago. It's especially special, because it was filmed entirely in the old Medusa's.
I made Brian dinner for his birthday that year, even though I was sick as a dog, and got mad at him for wanting to 'do it' later that night. No! I'm sick! I said. He left before morning, and I never saw him again.
Then there's this kid. (Don't ask me what's going on with my face. I don't know.) I can't for the life of me remember his name, but he lived with that queen who did the perfect, and do I mean perfect impersonation of crazy Faye from Mommy... in the scene where she goes nuts in the bathroom, for Berlin's old Sunday Night Drag Race. He didn't have his own room, and slept on the couch, so that's where we did it.
Who did I wake up to find passed out on my living room floor some ten years later but the Drag Race queen- he picked up a house guest of mine, who had the nerve to trick with him back at my place. The bitch stole from me, too. Shit turned up missin.
Then there's Steven. A cute guy with cute underwear who said would call but didn't. Steven was also, unbeknownst to me, a guy my friend Bea wanted me to meet. She kept talking about 'this guy', and I just had a feeling it was him. Sure enough, who walks in the door on the night I meet Bea's friend but Steven, who pretends he is meeting me for the first time. I just smiled and said hello, and told Bea the whole story later.
Oh then, there's the DJ, who I liked most of all. A gorgeous red head who picked me up one night in Vortex. (Ha ha. Vortex. That's funny.) It was one of those rare nights for me when more than one guy was after me. Kevin. He was charming and nice and great in bed, and actually called me the next day and we went to a movie, Home Alone, at the Water Tower, but that's as far as it went. I got the distinct impression I 'talked too much'.
The one that takes the prize is my New Year's fling, 1989. There was a party held at an old bank on the west side, and before I knew it, lips were locked and zippers descended in a stall in the men's room. I was wearing one of those chrome belt buckles you can customize the letters for, and mine said 'lipstick'. It clunked to the floor, and before I could pick it up, some skank snatched it away, like they were sitting there looking a their watch waiting for it. Well, I was too other-wise involved to hunt the bitch down, and chalked it up to the perils of toilet sex.
Now that I think of it, that is my last memory of the Eighties.
My first memory of the eighties was very nice: in the living room of our house in Connecticut on chilly December night, my younger brothers dozing on the couch, when I was fourteen, watching the ball in Times Square drop, on TV.
So I ended the eighties losing a valued accessory, and started the nineties with anonymous sex, and ended the nineties with....well, you'll have to read all about that later....

Common Labourer by Night

2008-07-09T22:26:00.004-05:00

The two guys stood in line together, in the drugstore side of the grocery store, on Broadway, by Addison, waiting to buy an enema. They were holding hands, so one could only assume they were boyfriends. They weren't particularly attractive, to me, but were cute in their own way. One of the guys looked like the kid I saw at the urinal in Cairo, an old disco on Wells, in what looked like his grandmother's Chanel boucle blazer. I was so jealous he was able to pull it off the way he did. I wonder what would spin Gabrielle faster in her grave: that us gays boys stuck her brooches on our motorcycle jackets back in the late 80's, or the chubby women with pantie lines and bratty kids sporting double 'C' sunglasses, today? Where will you go from there, Karl?
No one in the store seemed to notice the two guys, and what they were buying but me, and my only thought was when oh when will it be my turn?

I got into the habit of going to the Jewel down the street from my apartment on Mondays, my day off, in 1989, relishing my new healthy habits. My last apartment had no cooking gas, and I didn't really much care for food then, so I rarely shopped for it. It felt good to something good for myself for a change. I was doing a lot of things I had asked myself to do. I was saving money. I was making travel plans. I was letting go of my I can't attitude, and accomplishing things. I guess I came to an end to another self-destructive phase in my life, and was starting to rebuild. This was a place I knew all too well. I kept waking up alive, so I may a well go on living.
I went on with a sense of being another step further to being a grown up. I tried to do somethings with my life and failed, and that really hurt, but I didn't feel the need to wallow in my misery, and just kept on going. I failed pretty miserably, because I thought I wanted to spend the rest of my life in a relationship with Brad, and now I didn't think he would ever speak to me again.
I enjoyed and needed to be living again with Scot, and we spent most every night going out. Berlin, Cairo, Vortex, Christopher Street, and sometimes Medusa's, because Scot worked there during the day, 'fixing the repairs'. He found many interesting things on the floor the morning after, and one time it was a Cartier bracelet, which he gave to me, which I managed to keep for a year til I hocked it.
I didn't socialize too much when I went out; I would bury myself on the dance floor, with Scot, who would run on and off the dance floor when he saw someone he knew, and got lost in the music for hours at a time. Except at Vortex. The main dance floor was really not my scene music-wise back then, but they had a fun video room in the back, like C Street did, and I would request Gaultier's song over and over, along with Deep in Vogue, it's the Virgina Slims girl! (man, was it ever fun seeing Paris is Burning in the theater when it came out. It brought the house down!) and the Soul 2 Soul hits. And, of course, the most famous song of all, the beautiful Whisper. Scot would put this video on to get me to stop putting on make-up, and finally walk out our front door. It got me to go because I knew they would play it for me at Vortex, which was usually our first stop.
My 'during the day activity' was wearing thinner and thinner, but I kept myself distracted studying for my trip to London. I did want to go with my boss Concita, having heard the stories of the glories of her boozy, glamorous trips over the years, and I didn't want to take my first trip over seas entirely alone. I read up on what to expect and what I wanted to do in London for weeks, in my Let's Go and i-D. But soon after Scot and I moved in to our new place on Sheridan and Broadway, in 1989, we were to have a slew of house guests...

Some Girls are Bigger than Others

2008-07-03T08:37:00.002-05:00

OK, here it is, the moment you've been waiting for...
This what I did last week for Miss Serenity. It came down to a choice between M.I.A. Sunshowers and Moz's All You Need is Me (his most drag-queeny song to date. A compliment!). Although I did think long and hard about This Charming Man, but decided I was venturing too far into Sandie Shaw territory, and I wanted to do something original. I do love love love her version, so I stole her hair-do.
Either song would have had the dancing American junk food, and the food would have taken on an entirely different meaning. I can't say what the dancing food means in context to the M.I.A. song- you have to decide that for yourselves- but it is pretty fuckin hilarious.
Thanks to Anthony and Ed for performing with me, and to Richard for posting my vid and making me look, through his amazing editing skills, like I have any degree of talent.

The Step and The Walk

2008-06-29T22:29:00.007-05:00

Today I walked over to Chicago's Pride Parade, with Scot, and took some videos of the locations you've read about here. I know! How cool!
First, welcome to my art deco dump. Such a lovely day. Next, we're off to Somewhere in Time, on Pinegrove and Waveland, where I lived with Jody in 1987. I was about to tell the kids who had the sad task of moving today, while thousands walked past their apartment, all about my life there in 1987, so we could compare and contrast our experiences, but decided against it.
Lastly, it's the darkly sad apartment on Pinegrove and Patterson I had recently told you about moving out of, in 1989, in Shot by Both Sides. The gate was locked, but mine was the lowest balcony on the left.
As an added bonus, here's some pictures from earlier this week, from a dinner party in the art deco dump: Ambiance, and Guests.
Happy Pride!
(Thanks to Scot for The Duke Spirit. Play it loud!)

Mean To Me

2008-06-25T11:45:00.009-05:00

It was a warm, perfect summer day in Wisconsin. It took my eyes weeks to get used to sunshine, and I precariously rode around on my un-cool, banana seat-less bike, when the sun finally came out. In the mid seventies, if you didn't have a banana seat on your bike, you had a seat that looked like a pair of cement filled under wear. Very un-cool.
Brad lived to do the wrong thing, even back then, and we would ride around our neighborhood looking for 10-speeds for him wreck. He was so matter of fact with the passing of his knowledge to me, like he was teaching me how to roller skate.
This is how you strip a 10-speed's gears...
Oh. Ok. Should you be doing this?
We hung out by our school a lot, because it was a few blocks away from our homes. One day, in the ditch in front of the school, I noticed something shiny.
Now, I've always been a lover of all things shiny, so that was nothing new. Every chance I got I was into my mother's jewelry box, and I was constantly putting dimes in the plastic crap machines at the grocery store, to try to get a tin engagement ring with a pink rhinestone.
Earlier that year, our school held a carnival, with games, and the prizes were all that stuff I loved and coveted, but held as my own little secret: boys don't like pink rhinestones, or any rhinestones, as a matter of fact, so I dejectedly took the 'boy' prize whenever I won a game. Don't get me wrong, I did love getting a little plastic gun or dog, but I wanted the jewelry more, which brings us to a flash forward...
Sitting in the darken theater in my Connecticut high school in 1980, I learned a little something about myself: The movie we were watching featured Bette Davis (I think The Virgin Queen, but probably not) as the Queen of England, and, as a sub-plot, a gay couple got caught 'doing it' while wearing the expensive jewels they had stolen. I wasn't sure if the jewels made them horny, or the sense of security their value created, or the fact they were stolen from the Queen, but they did seem to play a major part of their amorous actions.
"Oh. Hmm. Gay and diamonds and rubies. Hmm. Whatta ya know..." I thought to myself.
Anyway, back to that summer day in 1977 with Brad, I saw a bunch of those plastic bracelets and rings and necklaces lying in the ditch, mouldering away. They were also lying with the 'boy' toys, but there were just too many toys there for me to think any one or two kids had put them there. There were dozens! I started picking them out of the muck as fast as I could, then slowly stopped.
I knew none of my classmates did this; we all wanted as much of the prizes as we could get. So either the teachers threw them here, or the people who ran the carnival did. Someone threw the things I had wanted so badly a few months ago into the ditch like it was garbage. Right in front of the school! They didn't even try to hide it!
I began to see the there was a difference between the true value things possessed, and the value I placed on them. It still doesn't stop me from buying things like this on Ebay, though.

In 1989, I moved out of my apartment on Pinegrove, and found a place with Scot. It wasn't too hard to find a place, for the moment we stepped into the courtyard on Sheridan by Broadway, we knew this was the place for us. It was big and light and in great shape for a vintage building, and very affordable.
I was happy Scot wanted to live with me, cause I really didn't want to be alone. And with Jody leaving Chicago, Scot was glad I asked.
My Floridian landlord was happy to see me go, and I walked my things down the street everyday for a week, and needed only one trip to move the rest of it, with a friend's car. This was my fourth year in Chicago, but it felt like my thirtieth.
For some reason, I played Crowded House's first two tapes over and over on my stereo, in the bedroom of my new place. Neil Finn therapy sessions. To this day, I am on Sheridan and Broadway if I hear a song of theirs. Those two tapes gave me such a complete feeling of utter failure, I'm not sure why I played them so much; maybe to spur me on to make some more changes in my life? I felt that way because theirs was boyfriend music; it was music I would make-out to, it was music you talked about the meaning of over dinner. It was music that could bring two people closer together. You don't have that, you don't have that...
I would come home from work and run to my room and shut the door and put on their music, for the first few months, but eventually I ventured out of my room, to begin getting to know my new world.

Found Found Found

2008-06-02T22:39:00.011-05:00

A little jump forward, then back...

Well, I have to admit, in 1991, when I saw Morrissey at The World, near Chicago, I was more into Boy George. The Martyr Mantras came out the year before, and to me it was a return to the sound that I came to love about him, and I could not take it out of my CD boom box for an entire year. I tracked down every single and remix I could find. Though KLF's The White Room did battle with ...Mantras for equal time.
So when my friend Chad asked me to see Morrissey with him that summer, I flinched a little. I thought I had broken up with Morrissey. I had seen The Smiths a few years back, at the Aragon Ballroom, but in The Queen Is Dead there lurked too many memories of my awkward and failed relationship with my boyfriend Jeff, and not to even mention the junkies and acid trips and unrequited loves that breathed a painful existence into Hatful of Hollow for me. So no, no Smiths for me any more, s.v.p.
Next came Strangeways and Viva Hate, two albums wrapped around my savior, destroyer, love of my life, and childhood best friend, Brad, where for two years in the late eighties, they were the soundtrack, to borrow a phrase (and mangle it), to the resignation of the ending our lives.
Morrissey has that wonderful way, for anyone the least bit introspective, of really getting to the core of something painful and human, an turning it into an art form that curls around you, and can influence who you are as a person, and create definition. I think all art, enduring or not, does that.
I could not divorce myself, in 1991, of the pain of my life in the late eighties I associated with Viva Hate, so Morrissey solo became off limits too, and he fell off my radar. But Chad's offer to see Morrissey got a whole lot sweeter, when he mentioned he could get us close to the stage, because of his boyfriend's connection: a doorman at The Plaza Hotel. Well, how could I say no to that!
I never did understand Chad and his boyfriend. I refused to understand, would be a better way to describe my feelings. Their thirty year age gap left me judgemental and doubtful of any real relationship, mainly because I wanted Chad for myself. He did manage to convince me, after many long talks, their relationship started how most relationships do: sexual attraction. The clincher, though, was when I saw Chad's collection of 'girlie' magazines. My I-finally-give-up-you-do-like-older-men sigh sent him into gales of laughter.
I wore my wonderful faux vintage 1940's Girbaud suit that I bought the year before at the downtown Manhattan Century 21, with a Sex Pistols t-shirt, and in the car on the way to the show, I made Chad promise a hundred times he wouldn't try to rush the stage and get arrested, leaving me to walk home from Tinley Park.
Now, of course, I wish would have kept my mouth shut.
He refused any money from me for the ticket, because the price for third row was pretty high, even by today's standards.

The giant Edith Sitwell back drop was an unexpected surprise, and the star of the show. As a child I spent way too much time making up stories about her, and the other dramatic pictures in Life magazine's best-of photo book. Her picture, giant, exposed, and frail, sleepily gazing down upon our adulation of our British pop idol, kind of made me fall in love with Morrissey all over again.
He looked wonderful and sexy, in his now famous gold lame v-neck, and writhed on stage in a way that told me he had moved way beyond his fey eighties ways. The most memorable songs for me that night were Our Frank, because of the storm of cigarettes that erupted over us, and ...Sunday, because of the passion he inspired in the audience. But the most memorable experience for me that night was asking what song is this! over and over to Chad, because I seemed to recognize so few songs of the man who, just a few short years ago, I thought I had known inside out.
I vowed then and there to catch up with Bona Drag (a pillow for my weary head) and Kill Uncle (a box of candy), but I ended up spending the rest of the summer with Salinger and Louder than Bombs.

I wanted to call this post Jesus Loves You, but I'm afraid my gay melodrama would be little sustenance to a Christian desperate enough to Google that phrase...

I'm Going Back to 505

2008-05-26T20:49:00.007-05:00

Gedney

I know, I've been talking about telling you about Delhi (not her real name) for some time now, but I still can't find that picture of us. So no Delhi story. I also can't find the snake brooch Jody gave me, which really upsets me. The weird thing is, Delhi recently emailed me, just when I was getting ready to write about her. I haven't heard from her in at least 15 years. Strange.
As stories go, hers is an interesting one to tell, because of her obsession with Johnathan. I used to get so frustrated with her about this, because he, at first, would pull me aside and whisper his confusion and discomfort to me about Delhi.
"Why is she acting like this, Brian?! Why is she so in love with me? You gotta do something!" He begged, his face dripping with desperation.
I say at first, because the look of dismay that clouded his face when we rounded the corner and approached his bar eventually was replaced with a look of acceptance, or maybe even a little bit of joy. Delhi could be a very persuasive gal, as well as a generous one. I know his pockets were never as full when he went home, as when she came around.
I was annoyed by her behavior, because I saw her advances toward him as unwelcome, so seemingly obviously unwelcome, and I found my experiences with that very extreme, in a scary way. When I was younger, I seemed to attract people who grew intensely found of me; who's dams would eventually burst into floods of emotion over me, that I guess I always secretly wanted, and expected.
Mainly, I saw way too much of myself in Delhi's behavior. I was blind to the fact that I acted toward Brad and Doug as she did toward Johnathan, but internally, on the inside, in my guts, in Fantasyland. I'd pay my admission and enter the gates and wander the grounds of If Only and What Could Have Been. I could spend hours there. And I did. I spent years there.
I could do it anywhere: laying in bed staring at the ceiling, while wandering the streets of Chicago, at work, in a bar, etc, etc. I knew it was expensive, in an emotional way, but it took me a long time to see it for what it really was- it's true cost was staggering.
But that was yet to come. As spring turned to summer, in 1989, I made many promises to myself, and I kept them as long as I could. The main promise I made was I would be happy, and if I wasn't, I faked it. I met a lot of fun new people, went to a lot of parties, taking care to not over do my imbibing, and lived my life as someone who loved them self would. I had to make up those rules for myself back then, I'm sure borrowing from my literary and musical heroes, because any sort of 'loving existence' was a dusty old thing, rolling around some forgotten corner in my head.
I was surprised at how easy it was for me to make those changes. I connected with people quickly, and my focus became talking with them and knowing them, instead of getting wasted or 'scoring' (anything and everything). I had my group at Berlin I danced with, and my group who I would wander the streets with til all hours, talking up a storm, and a group I would go with to parties and late night diners.
I used to think these were tenuous connections I had with these people, til I ran into one last year, and we picked up where we left off in 1990.
I would sit back in my mind, from time to time, while I was with them, and mull over how different they were from some of the people I had surrounded myself with of late: they had plans for their life that stretched past what was happening tonight, and looked at me like I had the same thoughts; they looked at me like they were excited for my future, because they knew it was going to be great.
So I made some plans for my life: I would save up and go to London and New York, and write more, and make more art.
I divorced myself of any physical intimate relationships, though, because the ones I was having in my head already took up all my energy. Though the relationships I'd had over the past couple years had ended in real life, I could not end them. Why? Did I need them to end differently? Was I looking for some loop hole, some sort of self-esteem loop hole? I'm sure I could write a list a mile long of whys.

I started to hang around my old friend Scot more, and we talked about getting an apartment together again. We were both experiencing major changes in our lives, and thought each other's daily company would be helpful. My apartment on Patterson held so many ghosts, and ghosts of a time in my life I needed to forget, I couldn't bear to spend any time there. In every corner lay a failure, and in every shadow hid a heartache. It was time to go.

Welcome to My Art Deco Dump

2008-05-13T14:12:00.005-05:00

I hate reality. It's so fucking real. It's so easy to dig yourself into a happy little rut of non-reality that takes years to perfect and develop, only to do something stupid like stop using a tool that helps you do it. Be in denial, that is.
As much as I like to think I live my life with an awareness of who I really am, I just found out nothing can be further from the truth.
I stopped smoking about a month ago, and it shattered the illusion of thinking I have a pretty good understanding, as it's happening, of how I can use 'things' or 'activities' to disguise aspects about myself or my life I don't like, or can't deal with.
I don't know where I learned to do that, white-wash reality, self-medicate, hide from the truth, be afraid of the truth, or whatever the hell you want to call it, but for me it started at an early age, with sugar consumption.
My friends, Cathy, Sue and I would shoplift dozens of candy bars at a time each after school, in our neighborhood gas station/convenience store, and sit in the parking lot and eat every last one before heading home to face our dreaded realities, sugar-coating the lumps and bumps of our horrid junior high lives nicely. If we could have been doing shots of whiskey, we would have. But that didn't come til the next year.
We did this every day, the girls getting plumper, til the tough, greasy-haired Wisconsin-style cashier woman caught on to our little scam, and busted us.
I guess writing these posts dredges up things I had forgotten I can only deal with when I smoke. But ya gotta fight through it, right? Like Saint George and the dragon? Whatevs. Ricolas help.

If you saw my apartment, you'd think it was a dump. I've got nothing...but good taste. Oh, it's designed to perfection; 1920 meets 1950 meets 1970 in a 2000's kind of way, in White Stripes red, black and white, but it's a dump. Little has changed since my place was built, before G.D. electricity was invented, and it shows.
I am writing to you from LA, and, now that I think about it, the last time I wrote a post out of town, in NY, I wrote about the deco era as well.
I often wonder about the folks who lived through that time. It was a boon time for American, and many buildings were built in that style that seemed to define the 20th century. Was thew average person 'over it'? Did they roll their eyes at seeing yet another Art Deco building going up in their neighborhood?
I know I roll my eyes and spit in disgust when I see something new in my neighborhood that tries to look modern. It always seems to come across as cheap, or worse yet, derivative. I guess what really can annoy me about new constructions is that it usually destroys something old and interesting.
Though sometimes, they do get it right, like the house built on Wrightwood, just off Clark. It took them years to create it, and I watched it grow daily, inch by inch, for it was on my walk to work at the time. There is an ugliness to it, but the right kind of ugly.
"Ooo, that place is the right kind of ugly" I thought to myself when I heard President Clinton had dinner there. He wouldn't eat in any old dump. Even the years old pine trees were imported, and placed to look like their seeds just happen to land there, fifty years ago.

I'm guessing the people of the twenties marveled at being surrounded by so much new modernity, and felt they had an active hand in creating the twentieth century, by brushing off the excess design and darkness of the previous century, leaving the fruits of the desire to create a clean balance.
What inspires me, in the dawn of this new century, are homes donated and built by volunteers for people who need them, and how the younger generations in my family desire to be apart of that world, like I was drawn to be apart of the creative world.
And the ultra-hyper modern public spaces created in Chicago over the past few years remind me of a quote by Joan Miro: My art work is an invation for the youth of today to invent the future.

A Chain of Flowers

2008-04-30T22:22:00.003-05:00

I am trying to find this picture I have of Delhi, this hilarious picture, so I can tell you about her obsession with Johnathan. The picture is perfect, because we're at Limelight, where Johnathan worked, and we're all glammed out in wigs and ugly, late 80's clothes. But I can't find it anywhere. Don't fret, I know I have it.
I did find some pictures I have been thinking about recently, though. I guess because I am a visual person, I think about pictures for days and hours, until they become a part of me.
First is one of me in Prague, about ten years ago. I've been thinking about his picture because I wore the vest this past winter, and because I've started working back in the salon where I worked with the woman who snapped it. She's not there anymore, at the salon, that is, but this is the second major event in my life I've revisited. The first was doing the play The Birds again, and I am just wondering what the Universe is trying to tell me. I think everything happens for a reason.
The second is me in London, in 1990, at The Tower. I like this picture because I think it's funny, me standing in the guard box, wearing a purse. Halt! Who gays there!

The Tower of London is really incredible, and everyone should go, and today I watched the BBC 4's eight-part series, a series I didn't know I was obsessed with til I saw the episode I saw on one of my many trips there. (The episode about the archaeologists at low tide) But today while I watched the show, I had this song in my head.
The next is of my brothers and my mom, in 1980, on a ferry, on our way to Liberty Island, to see the Statue. It's sad and dramatic, and to me, very American. Whenever I see the color blue that I imagine is in this picture, I have to stop and stare and ask myself, how do I know this color?
Next is of my brothers again, Christmas morning, 1977. I took the picture with my newly opened camera. The colors have faded over the years, but the mood is still captured. This was our first Christmas in our own house, for my dad lived with his father for a while after my parent's divorce. I've been thinking about this picture because I've recently been spending time at my grandfather's house, and all the emotions it's been bringing up has been a little startling. I had many nice moments there, but also a lot of bad ones, and I guess I had forgotten them. It's always good to have a clear picture of what really happened, of the good and the bad.
Here's one of my brothers Jeff and James, me, and Eighties Erin, in 1988. My brother Chris must have taken it. I also think this picture is hilarious, and I am going to Yaz this summer with Erin.
The lead picture is of Thelma Todd, because I'm reading a book about her murder. They say there is no proof the man 'responsible' for her death was ever in LA, but the building where her restaurant was is still there, and I'm going to check it out when I go there next month.
I hope you enjoyed this little digression from my story, but I can't tell you about Delhi til I find the picture.

I'm Leaving with an Astronaut

2008-04-22T11:34:00.005-05:00

Ugh. My first post without a cigarette...oh yea, and with glasses.
And if you want to know what the eighties smelled like, check out this cologne. I love, love it, but they should change the name from Dusk to Gay Bar, 1982.

I have always been jealous of people who ride the train to work. To me, they were successful. They wore suits. It meant you were 'somebody'. It meant you made it.
Back in the early eighties, when I moved to Chicago, my college educated friends and clients would, in my eyes, glamorously complain about their arduous daily treks to the loop, highlighting the monotony, and the element of danger.
Oh, it's just the daily grind and lack of options that start getting to you after a while. I mean, you can't drive and park downtown everyday!
In the eighties, train riders looked contented, well fed, and well shod. They wore the knowledge of their consistent routines snugly, next to their hearts, never to let them go. I made a commitment to myself back then, to get the kind of life they had, those train riders. Or was it their paychecks?
I worked on a commission, and for years I took home, well, let's just say I didn't take much home at all. If my friends hadn't paid the bills in those early days, I wouldn't be here.
Happily, those days were short lived, and when the time came that I took the train everyday to work, I wore suits and blazers, only not 'square' ones, and I rode with a sense of security, taking my place among the chosen ones.

After B left, in early '89, I wandered the streets of Chicago for hours, everyday, and every night, blasting my headphones.
I forewent public transportation and walked to work, then walked home, always taking the long way.
I took the Sugarcubes, Big Thing, Terrence D'arby, Strangeways, or High Hat with me to keep me company on those cold walks, the rainy walks; the sunny walks and hot walks.
Even though I knew I did the right thing, and asked B to move out, I was so sad about not being strong enough to change us both. I was sad about a lot of things between us. I knew I needed to make a lot of changes, but I thought I could do it for him, too.
The day he left, I decided to be a new person. I stopped listening to those negative voices that I heard all my life, those negatives voices that became negative thoughts about myself, and justified a hell of a lot of drinking and drug use. I just stopped. Stopped listening. I pretended I had never heard anything negative about myself. Never. Never heard it. I turned myself into the person I always wished I could be. Even though it wasn't real, I didn't care. I was going to see how long I could get away with it.
For the rest of 1989, I was a normal, well adjusted 23 year old, who didn't grow up the way I did, and who never touched a drink or a drug. I just wasn't. I liked it, and it felt good to be that person. It felt good to go out and come home and remember what had happened the night before, and not be embarrassed or ashamed. It felt good to be around new people, because I didn't have to worry about what would happen if I drank too much, because I didn't drink too much.
Around this time I started spending day light hours and many nights with my latest crush, Richard. Rumor had it he was one part of a motorcycle name, but I didn't ask or care, he was a beauty. (Though I did see his balance one night before Limelight, at an ATM, and there were a couple digits in front of that comma.)
I remember him having tons of gum in his car, and it felt great to spend time with someone who's company I enjoyed, and to feel present with him.
I was shocked when he asked if he could come over one night; shocked because I realised I had somehow started to believe that I was someone no one wanted to date. It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was scary. I really believed it! But then I remembered I was someone new.
Because I was spending more time with Dehli, or because Erin was spending more time with Donnie and his gang, she and I spent less time together. Erin and Dehli didn't get along, and I didn't try to fight it.
Dehli would fly into town every weekend for Limelight and shopping sprees. She bought up every dress Lane Bryant on Wells, after I watched her try every single one on, and she bought up every single stitch of Baronni make-up at Carson's. Literally. She said her parents kept thousands of dollars in their safe, and didn't seem to mind that she 'helped herself'.
I would train down to the Holiday Inn, when it was still on the lake, every Saturday night, and we'd cab over to Limelight. Even though I was off the pills and the booze, I was still very much on the freak train when it came to my late night get-ups, and we loved freaking out the hotel's other guests.

100% nicotine-free post. I'll finish this later!

You Were a Photograph

2008-03-29T21:47:00.005-05:00

Last Thursday:
He stood tall, and proud, while he waited for the traffic light to change, to cross the street, and he crossed the insanely busy intersection of Irving Park, Damen, and Lincoln with not nearly the same amount of foreboding I do. His eyes darted a bit, but his face portrayed that of a man who has calmly looked into the eyes of death and said not today, but if I have to tomorrow, I'm ready.
I fucking hate crossing that intersection.
I know when I cross the street there, I tend to convey a look, to the drivers coming toward me, of someone who would undoubtly use the last of their strength, if I were to be hit, to drag them out of their car and erase their face with the pavement. I know I would scare myself if I were to ever see that picture of my face, so I make a conscious effort to minimize the daggers shooting out of my eyes.
The death of the traffic-disobeying bicyclist a few weeks ago, at that same intersection, doesn't help matters much.
The tall and proud guy walked to the bus stop where I was waiting, to catch the same bus I wanted. He reminded me a bit of the Daniel Day Lewis character in In the Name of the Father, who, while decked out in the hottest 1970's duds, pathetically exposed his involvement in a crime he got paid well to do, by walking down the gloomy, dirt poor street he lived on, in said duds.
This guy's clothing was as close as you could get to a 2008 version of a super-cool 1973 outfit, right down to his perfect Bay City Rollers haircut. He looked adorable.
I read no irony on his face, no pride, nor contempt to the less fashionable around him, just a sense that he enjoyed this role he played on the bus this day.
Being a lover of fashion, I try my best to keep up on the trends, but I realised, looking at this guy, I hadn't been paying attention to the fashion world very much lately, because he was that convinced his outfit was right.
I decided there could be no irony on his face, because he wasn't born til the mid eighties, and he hadn't lived the 70's fashion like I had, and I was looking at him now how I'm sure people my age did when I was 20, when I wore my 1960's duds.
We both rose at the same time, to get off at Sheridan Road, and then I saw his hand.
Wow, he has white skin. I thought to myself. There is a rash of doughy looking guys on the bus today. This is the third guy I've seen with skin that looks like it's just been kneaded and floured and is waiting for the oven.
Wait, no, that's not skin. He has an artificial arm.
I saw nothing in his bearing or expression that broadcast his artificial limb. I was dumbfounded. Could I ever move about the world the way this guy did? Minus one arm, but with total confidence and humility? I doubted it. I doubted it because I was getting ready to have a long and dragged out pity party for myself, because of finding out that morning I have to wear glasses, because I'm middle aged.
Now I have to cancel the party.

In early 1989, I lost it. I mean really lost it. I went with B to Jim and Christine's new apartment on Sheridan, by the El stop, to hang one Saturday night. I've been seeing that stop a lot lately, because I've been taking the train to work again. I wonder, how many times I will have to pass that stop without traveling through a time tunnel?
I always found it odd that Sheffield becomes Sheridan Road by the train stop. Right by that other strange street, Alta Vista Terrace, which looks like a little piece of London dropped into Lakeview. That part of Chicago holds many ghosts for me, and I cannot think of that area without picturing it cold and rainy. In those dark and gloomy little apartment buildings, I spent many nights wasting time til the sun came up, with friends and enemies, often times, but not always, hating every moment.

I spent a lot of time in that neighborhood back then, but I was afraid to take the train from that stop. I still did it, Look at me! I'm tough! but I was sure I would be murdered before the train arrived.
B and I spent many nights with Jim and Christine, at their various apartments, but this night I couldn't take it any more. I couldn't take their stupid drug talk. Someone brought up H, wishing they had some, or just wanting some, and someone else chimed in agreement, and this went back and forth for a few minutes, til I flipped out.
"Are you fucking nuts! Bob just died! B is still a wreck because of it! He fucking ODed! And you idiots want some? You're assholes!" I screamed at them til B dragged me out of the room.
"What are you doing here?" I screamed at him, as I tore myself away from him and stormed out the back door. I waited for him to come after me, which he did, and I told him if he didn't leave with me, not to come home. He didn't.

"B, let's go to NA. Or AA, or whatever A there is. I know they can help us. We can't stop this, B. Drugs have taken over our lives. Bob's dead, and look at us! We're worse off than we were before. We have to try and do something!" I said to B.
I couldn't believe the words that had started coming out of my mouth lately. I never talked about anything; I never told B or anyone how I really felt, but here I was doing it. Something took over me. Maybe it was my love for B, and wanting to stop his downward spiral. My subconscious knew I had to break out of my silence, and try to save his life.
I couldn't convince him to go to NA or AA for his problem. His. I didn't have a drug and alcohol problem. I was just broken. Fucked up. I wished I was an addict or alcoholic. Those seemed like an easy problems to solve. Mine were much more complicated than that. But I must say, it did feel right to ask him to go to NA or CA or AA with me, and I felt this feeling of 'exposing a truth' about myself to B. I told him I would go for him, hoping it would help me, too.
I couldn't convince him to go, because he heard the meetings were about God, and God forbid our lives became about God, because that is so much worse than what it was really about.
I did understand the heart of his argument: the homophobia that wears a 'God' mask, but I was used to seeing that mask, and felt I could go on pretending it wasn't there, if it meant I could be shown a way to live my life without drugs and alcohol.
But we didn't go. We never went. I did make a secret promise to myself, in 1989, that if I did any drugs ever again, I would get some help. I made that promise because I told Brad let's go to NA or CA or AA, not you need to go.

A few weeks later, I had to ask B to move out. I hated asking him to leave. I know he was at Jim and Christine's because of drugs, and I couldn't handle it any more. I knew if he didn't leave, neither of us would live to see 1990. He didn't put up much of a fight; he knew it would end badly if he didn't. He didn't even move into Jim and Chris's place; he moved to Milwaukee, with someone there he still kept in touch with. I asked him why he didn't move in with Jim, and he just looked at me with a look that said I'll die there, without saying a word.
This is about life and death. I said to him, without saying anything to him.

A playlist for those grey, gloomy days on the Northside, for the class of '84...

Sex and Dying in High Society

2008-03-18T22:33:00.005-05:00

Some strories, and some crimestories, from 1988 and 1989, in honor of the movie Public Enemies, which has recently begun filming here in Chicago, and for X performing at Metro...

1988:
Click on the radio, The Beth and Tim Show, a conversation:
The Rapture is happening tonight. By midnight tonight, you will either disappear, or you will be left behind to fight WWIII. What? Disappear? Yes disappear. That's what the Rapture is: the good Christians will disappear, taken by God up to heaven in an instant. It doesn't matter what you're doing; you could be driving or flying a plane or performing an operation, you will cease to exist on this planet. Where is this coming from? Who said it? It's from a book I recently found, 88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Happen in 1988. Remember I told you about that book? I was saving talking about it til tonight. Thanks for the warning! You could've let me prepare. Well, the author gives a window of this week in September when this will happen, and this is the last day of his prediction.

Will I disappear to heaven? I thought to myself. Am I a good Christian? Hell no! I don't even clean my cat box enough. I'm not a good anything. Could I get a special dispensation for all the crap I had to endure in my life? A sort of get out of jail free card?

Get ready! If someone comes for you tonight, go with them! You don't want to be stuck here with all us sinners! The second coming of the lord means the rise of the anti-christ! We will be left to do his bidding. I'm sure that won't be fun. Oh yea, no, that would be bad. I hope I get to go to heaven. Do you think I will go to heaven, Tim? Am I a good person? I don't think the Rapture has anything to do with being a good person or not. It's about being a good Christian. I think we both fail that. Maybe, I guess. So following the Rapture, there will be seven years of tribulation, where millions of people will die, and we will see the worthy dead rising from their graves, to go up to heaven, too. Wow. Reanimation. Wow. I'd like too see that. Really? I wouldn't. The world will be thrown into chaos as all these people disappear, and the dead come back to life.
There is some good news, though. Those of us left will get a second chance to go to heaven, if we become good Christians, you know, do good things: sacrifice yourself for others, etc. Wow. Seems we might have our work cut out for us, starting tomorrow. I hope you're ready! I hope someone comes for us, Beth! I hope we get to leave tonight...

God, is this real? Do people really think this? Is WWIII starting? Will I disappear tonight? Ding-dong! My door bell! My door bell is ringing! What do I do? Should I answer it? I'll peek out the window to my door...no one's there! I'll go downstairs and see...no one! I'm freaking out! I'll walk out my front door...
As I leave my courtyard, I see Dehli walking up the sidewalk.
"Yes, it was me! I forgot something in my car."
"Oh. Hi. I thought it may have been Jesus Christ..."

1989,I:
I hadn't worn these in a while. I thought as I put on my running shorts from my teenage days. I should actually use them some time. I wonder how I look in them. Probably not as good as I did back then. Oh well, everything else is dirty, so I have to wear them to do my laundry. Who knows, maybe some cute guy will like what he sees...
I had a lot of laundry to do, and I was in and out of my apartment via the back courtyard into the basement many times that day. It was a little too cold for short shorts, but what can you do. After the second or third trip, I felt eyes on me, and after the fourth or fifth trip, I stood on my back porch, scanning every square inch, because something felt wrong. Someone was out there. The courtyard wasn't that big, so after my long scan, and seeing nothing, I felt it was just my imagination. In the laundry room, I kept one eye on the door, just in case.
Mid way through my chores, Dehli came by for a visit. She lived a few blocks away, and liked to come over spur of the moment a lot. After a few minutes of chitchat with Dehli, a loud scream blares from across the hall, from my neighbor's place, and I fling open my front door, because I happened to be standing by it, and in an impossibly short amount of time, she is out her front door, and in the courtyard yelling for someone to call the police.
"Are you OK? What's wrong?" I call to her from my balcony.
"Call the police! There is a man in my apartment! She yells back.
During this time, in early '89, there was an unfortunate rash of rapes occurring in Chicago that had gone unsolved, and my neighbor was his next intended victim. I tried to invite her into my apartment to wait for the police, but she was too afraid to go back inside. She was, in fact, too afraid to even stay in her apartment, and moved out a few days later. Dehli ran home, so I called Erin and asked if she could pick me up to see a movie; I needed to get out of there, too.
I came home a few hours later to find the police still at her apartment, dissecting the clues he had left behind, and questioning her. They never questioned me.
The next day, I knocked on her door to check on her, and she gave me the story:
She came home to find her cat running around her apartment, freaking out, and opened her closet to put her coat away, when a man jumped out and tried to attack her. She was able to evade him, as I witnessed. I never saw someone move so fast my whole life, I told her. And the police found things under her bed that weren't hers: lengths of rope and rolls of tape.
"They dusted everything of mine for prints, trying to find out who he was. They said he came in the back door. Did you see anything? I just can't think about what he might have done. I can't live here anymore. I'm moving back home." She said.
I told her I had been home all day, and in the back courtyard a lot, but hadn't seen anything. I tried to assure her by saying I was sure I would have heard something wrong coming from her place, if she hadn't gotten out when she did. Maybe I was trying to assure myself.

1989, II:
"Come on Brandon, let's make-out in the closet. Let's have sex in the closet. It's a big closet!"
I said to my old high school classmate, whom I drug home with me one night from B's bar.
"I aways had a crush on you." I confessed. He might have had a passing interest in me that night, but he ran out of my walk-in closet after a minute or two, each time I pushed him in there.
"Aww, come on Brian, let's hang out with B in the living room." He said. B had brought a guy home with him, too, and a big stash, assuring a long night of partying was imminent. I tried to coax Brandon in one more time:
"Alright, just for a little while." He said. But after a minute, he said "No. This is weird." And went home.
A little later, B started to get hot and heavy with his guy, and I didn't want to watch, so I spent the night passed out in my closet, alone.

Photographic Pictures

2008-03-09T20:15:00.003-05:00

Go over to my friend Johnny's blog, A Hole in the Head, to read a story I wrote for him.

The Curtain Falls to No Applause

2008-03-05T21:28:00.010-06:00

In the first week after moving into my current apartment, I went grocery shopping at the store conveniently located across the alley. Grocery stores forever hold a special place in my heart, for my life seems at times to revolve around them. When I think back on my life, I always start with where I grocery shopped. My mother once told me she went into labor with me while she was at one, so that may have something to do with it.
Anyway, one night in the early stages of my relationship with my new store, I noticed two boys walking up to the self-check out lane. They must have been 14 or 15, and tall for their age. Their clothes were dirty, weeks dirty, and hung loosely on their thin frames, and their shoes were old and worn out, and also too big for them. They knew they were dirty. They knew they weren't dressed like other people. They knew people thought little of them, and they kept their eyes on the floor and slouched as they walked. They wore the weight of their dysfunctional family, which can feel like the weight of the world when you're that age, palpably on their shoulders, and deep within them. But they also had an aura of humility and sweetness to them, that seemed to fill the room. At that moment while I stood trying not to stare too much at them, as they ripped my heart out, they allowed themselves the briefest moment of quiet glee over the bottle of soda and candy bar they were buying. They had spent some time carefully figuring out how far their money would go, for they slowly scanned the items, and checked the monitor to make sure they didn't go over budget.
Again, a brief smile crossed their lips when they realized they could leave the store with what they wanted.
I remembered when I was a boy, and a can of soda was something special. I remembered when a small, happy moment shared with a brother or friend was a welcome oasis during the trials of childhood.
I wanted to give them every cent in my pocket. I wanted to cook them a big dinner. But what I wanted most was to set them free. I wanted them to know no matter what was going on in their lives now, they had the power within themselves to create any kind of life they wanted.
I didn't talk to them that evening at the grocery store, mainly in fear I was projecting something of my own life onto their situation that may or may not have been there, but I look for them and think of them every time I go back.

It's Up to You

I thought B moved out of my apartment on Pinegrove after Christmas of 1988, but I found the Valentine cards we gave to each other, in 1989, so now I don't remember when the hell he moved out. But I do remember that Christmas of '88...
Christmas. I don't know what it is with me and that holiday, but there is something.
That year it was especially cold, and now, as I write this, I remembered B was still tending bar at Windy City, and had to work Christmas Eve, and I didn't want to leave him home alone for the holiday, especially since the last time I did that, someone died.
Erin and I went Christmas shopping together at Oakbrook Mall, where she worked, and I bought Brad some under ware and cologne, and she gave me my present there, at her work. It was a brooch with a built-in perfume bottle, which I, of course, still have.
How I managed to spend any money on gifts and not drugs and alcohol, is a mystery to me, especially since my landlord had to call me every month to remind me to pay him. I always did, but always late. Thank God he lived in Florida, and probably wouldn't be knocking on my door any time soon.
I spent Christmas Eve with B, at his bar, til 4 am, and when it came time to leave, he didn't want to stop the party. We went home to get the money I had purposely left there, for fear of spending it on blow, to go buy some blow.
We walked to Halsted, to his connection's house, in the bitter cold. B rang his bell, and told him what we wanted, and heard But it's Christmas, B. over the intercom. Yea, I know what day it is. You have any or not? B answered back. A pause, then the buzzer let us in.

I sat on the stairs, trying to squeeze some warmth back into myself after the long, cold walk to this apartment, while B knocked on the door. When the over-weight, middle aged, bleached blond man opened his door, I could just see a sliver inside his place. It was a Christmas shrine. Every square inch was decorated, and all of it glowed on fire from the post dawn sun streaming in his east facing windows. Dozens of presents sat under the opulent tree, as he sarcastically said Merry Christmas, and handed B an envelope. A waif-like Asian guy, clad only in bikini briefs, gingerly tip-toed up behind his benefactor, to see just who was making such an early Christmas Day purchase. He quietly said Hi B with a smile, as the blond shut the door.
For someone who peddles such shit, he's sure full of the holiday spirit. I said, as we walked for a cab. B said nothing.
I noticed in the car on the way home, it somehow got colder. Everything was covered in a thin layer of white ice. Nothing moved, nor seemed able to move, and the newly risen sun burned an acid yellow glow into everything. Everything looked dead.
The end. This is it. It's over. This is never happening to me again. I thought to myself.

I awoke Christmas Day at around 5pm, and quickly ran out the door to buy a holiday feast at White Hen I didn't have to cook, (no stove, remember?) and a log for the fire place. I had to beg B to get out of bed to eat something, and to share some sort of Christmas together. Give me another hour or so: Bob. He said. All he would have to say to me was 'Bob', and I understood.
I spent the time in the kitchen, making the meal look nice, and sat and waited for B to get up, to give him a nice Christmas.
He eventually did, and we ate our meal in the dark, save for the glows of the fireplace and the TV, as we watched a movie neither of us had seen before, It's a Wonderful Life, choking down cheese and crackers and swigs of beer through our tears.

Thinking of You

Links: The Colourfield, The Specials

Why Do You Come Here?

2008-02-28T22:59:00.004-06:00

Did you ever love an album so much you prayed you could will yourself into your stereo, in live in it's world? You close your eyes an pour yourself into the spinning vinyl to awaken into an auricularly born land. Every word creates a life and every note a breath. Each lyric is a meal, every song a home. And you don't care if you don't ever leave. Did you ever have such a need to do that?

Sunday

In December of '88, B and I were failing miserably in our attempt to move on with our lives after Bob's death. That December of '88 felt like it lasted a year. B wasn't working, and spent all day sleeping, and would wake up after I got home from work. I decided to let him do whatever he needed to do to grieve for Bob. I would not judge or condemn his actions; I would partake in them. We spent all my money going out. We went were the booze was cheap or free, sometimes spending more on the bus fare there and back than on the alcohol itself, and we would drink, inhale, and snort every cent, not talking, with an occasional quarter in a jukebox. I tried to find songs that triggered memories of happier times from our boyhood.

"Remember when we would drive around with Crazy David blasting this cassette? What a mess she was! What do you think he's doing now? Still screaming at his parents?! Oh God, this song. Mike and Todd never went a second without this album on back then, remember?!"

He would smile a moment or two, but B was like a champion chess player when it came to drinking: his concentration lay in planning ahead as to how he was getting his seventh and eighth drinks of the night.
Even in the state he was in, a slight smile in any guy's direction would buy whatever he wanted. Whenever I saw him do that, I was reminded of the day a few years back when I met him downtown after he got his GED results. The man who gave him his grades told him he had the highest score he'd seen in a while, and he should go to school.
He can do whatever he wants, and he chooses this. I would think to myself.
This was the time I first attempted to read Neuromancer. (A book I still read once a year.)
"B, can you try to read this book for me? I get fifty pages into it and I don't understand what's happening." I asked him one night.
I couldn't 'get' how one character was able, via computer implants, to experience the world through another character's body. Then I didn't understand the concept of AI, and how, in that book, it was created with the memories of a dead man, and how the main character talked to him in a virtual reality situation.
"I can't read much any more, Brian. I just can't concentrate."
After hearing that, I would buy him comic books and magazines, and leave them laying about in hopes he would pick one up. One night I got out all the high school notes he had ever written me, for I saved them all, and we read each one. We got into the habit back then of writing each other on Sunday nights, during American Top 40, to fill each other in on what had happened over the weekends we weren't together. I was usually at Bodyshop, in Green Bay, an amazing, ahead of it's time, new wave gem of a gay bar, when I was in high school, and he was usually with Sean, his ex-football player, ex-hetero boyfriend.
Reminding each other of the recalcitrant times in our lives, when we rose above our problems, steeled us. Once upon a time, we could laugh at the invading armies hell-bent on our destruction, that lived in our homes and hometowns back then, because we knew something they didn't; we listened to our hearts and souls and embraced them; we instinctively trusted them. I guess somewhere along the way we forgot how to do that. I guess somewhere along the way we became our own enemies.

Hypnotize (over and over)

Those long nights of pollution wouldn't end when we came home. B couldn't really handle the things he snorted, and the extreme paranoia it created in him would make him position mirrors from his side of the futon, so he could see the front and back doors, because he 'knew' the police were going to crash in at any second. Coke heads are a nightmare to live with, especially bad ones. He would try to drag me into his paranoid fantasies, but I would make matters worse by conspiratorially whispering to the 'people' outside the apartment, or by shouting Drugs! or Illegal! out the back door as loud as I could. I would wake up the next morning to find him still awake, playing the stereo, or worse yet, ripping the closet apart to find the stash 'he knew he left somewhere...'

Angel

B's self-destruction, and Bob's death, reminded me of the destiny I was headed for, and my inability to stop it. That December I gave myself many pushes in that direction, to speed the process along, because the tedium of the second hand was maddening.
"What are you doing to yourself! What is all this blood!" B would scream at me. "Do you want to die that badly?"
I thought about it for a minute, and said "No. But I can't live like this."
I thought I was empty. I thought I couldn't take another step. But there was something inside of me I was barely aware of; an insatiable curiosity, an untapped vein of creativity, an unseen spring of love, building a momentum of energy, keeping me going, and I finally heard it's voice, and decided to listen to it for a while.

Links: Morrissey, Human League, Grace Jones, Scritti Politti

Paler than the Moonlight

2008-02-18T22:13:00.004-06:00

halahala

I talked to B everyday while I was away in Arkansas, that Thanksgiving of '88. He was indescribably upset. His friend was gone, and I know he blamed himself. I know he felt, as I did, Bob had nowhere to turn, and he saw no hope in the eyes in the two people left in his life.
"The hospital was so mean to me when I called to ask about him." B told me one day on the phone. "They just said: 'Oh, he's dead. O.D.' and hung up. The police were just as bad. I guess if you're an addict, you're worthless to them. When they saw his only possession was a backpack full of clothes and condoms, they dismissed him as a hustler, and left."
"Do you think they'll be back?" I asked. I had no idea what I'd be walking into once I got home.
"No, they won't be back." He said.

Paper Float

I talked to Erin everyday while I was away, too. She empathized with Bob, and told me some of the terrible things he experienced growing up, and really didn't know how anyone could survive what he did, without intense therapy, which Bob hadn't got. Then she started to bring up the idea of me telling B to move out.

"He's a bad influence on you, and he knows it. B told me himself. He does love you, but you can't have him in your life and expect it to go anywhere." She said.

Part of me knew she was right, but part of me couldn't accept this person, who had saved my life so many ways and so many times, and on so many levels, could turn into a destructive force to me. I couldn't change me perspective of B over night.

"Spend time with him, talk to him, keep loving him, but just don't live with him. I'm afraid what will happen if you do."

I made up my mind I would try to help him. I would try to get him to go to NA or AA or where ever I could. I saw him heading down the same path as Bob, and I wanted to do my best to try and stop that. I would quit doing drugs. I would drink less. I would spend more time painting and drawing and making clothes.

Delivery.

I bought Erin a tiny blue sapphire ring, at the JC Penny in Little Rock, for Christmas, as a way of showing her how much I valued her in my life.
I told my family what had happened, but kept it vague: B's friend died. They didn't press me for more details, I'm sure out of fear, but had they, I probably would have spilled my guts; I was so at the end of my rope.
Erin picked me up at the airport, and went to my apartment with me. I talked to B the night before, and we promised each other we would get through Bob's death together, get through everything together, make some changes, and find some happiness; find something other than what we were finding. I thought we were on the same page. I thought he understood...
I walked into the apartment to find him in bed with a trick, drugs everywhere.
I lost it. I freaked out.
"How could you do this, with Bob death just a week ago? What are you on? How much have you taken? Why do you want to die like he did!!" I went on and on, to the point the guy in my bed ran out the door naked. I was crying in the kitchen after my outburst, and Erin came in to console me.
"Do you want him to leave now?" She asked.
"No. Just talk to him, Erin. Get him to understand. I don't know what to do." I said.
After a while, to lighten the mood, I gave Erin her gift early.
We talked through the night about everything: what had happened to Bob, our futures together, and what we would do next to make our lives better. I didn't believe a word B said, nor a word that came out of my mouth.

In a Manner of Speaking

Links: Duran Duran, Cassetes Won't Listen, Babyshambles, Nouvelle Vague

Shot by Both Sides

2008-02-10T23:45:00.000-06:00

In 1988, I wrote a silly story about a memory I had about watching my parent's lives before I was born, and my excitement about my future adventures with them. I also wrote a story about what would happen if I fainted while turning up the volume on the TV, and how my neighbors would react. B read them, and liked them, and thought I should write more.
Even though my life was crumbling around my ears, I heeded my creative muses, and painted, drew, designed and made clothes, and wrote. (Being able to do this drawing of Boy, in early 89, gave me a reason to keep fighting the good fight.) Sometimes it's good to spend some time on the right side of the brain, and forget, for a while, logic, and the pain and illogic of drug and alcohol abuse.
Some of us get lucky, or blessed, or helped, or whatever the hell it is, at the right time, and find a way to make it to the other side of our addiction; to make a life with some moments of serenity and self production, versus self destruction. I am happy to say I am one of those people.
Some of us make it. Some of us...

"Brian! Bad Brad's here to see you! Hi Bad Brad!" My boss's nickname for B was Bad Brad. He came by the salon to pick me up, the night before I left to visit my family
"Brian, I'm worried about Bob. He's taken 8 of those green pills. Eight. Those things stay in your system for days. If I had taken that many, I'd be dead now. I don't know what to do." He said.
"If you can't make him stop, who can? Besides, Bob knows what he's doing. He knows what he can take. He's a big guy, too. I'm sure everything will be fine." I said, and believed.

Bob was a big guy, about 75 pounds over weight, and a junkie, so I didn't think he would be affected by some pills, no matter how strong. Bob had bought a bunch for income while I was home for the holidays, because by this time B had lost his job, and I (barely) paid all the bills. They would need some money while I was gone. He didn't sell them, though. He took them all.

For a month, B worked tending bar, and quickly developed a little fan base of patrons, of which I was one. We were a close group, letting the tanned, be-quiffed, sparkly thin queens (it was the 80's, after all) rule the dance floor, while we and huddled in our rumpled, unwashed all black, in our dark corner, every weekend. Watching videos, while B gave me shots, the irony of The Way that You Love Me, was not lost to me. (The video bar in front, where B worked, had a very limited selection of songs us music snobs could stomach. We each had one, and that was mine.)
I had a crush on one of our group, Jim, and would I pray to someday to have what it took to be with him. He had dark brown hair, big brown eyes, perfect white skin, and a beautiful shadow of pathos. I can still see him there, in the run down bar, in his thrifted black mole hair sweater, and Doc Martins:
"Why are you throwing your life away here?" I thought as I looked at Jim that night. "You could be anywhere with anyone you wanted..."
B had been with Jim for a while, but Jim still wanted to be with B, so he was around a lot.
(Jim made it to the other side; I ran into him one night in the late nineties, looking older and wiser, but still good.)
Oh god, the things we did in the Windy City bathroom. It was endless. Steve, one of the group who had a crush on me, started kidnapping me to the suburbs, to Hunters, and I happily complied, to escape the black hole that was Windy City. The first night this happened was after seeing a revival of Hair, down the street at the Vic, where my salon went for an early Christmas outing.
I had seen quite a lot of theater during this time, and experienced the odd phenomenon of the fourth wall being broken down in my face, most every show. To the point of teasing by the friends I went with. Just when I thought could relax, and an actor wouldn't talk to me, they did. Maybe they knew something I didn't: if you would have told me back then I would one day in the future have more than 10 years of stage acting experience in Chicago, I never could've believed it. Yet I do.
Steve always had way too much to drink before we drove back to the city, and by some miracle, I'm still here.

Bob, I was to find out later, was hitting bottom. He hadn't a real job, but sold himself at Man's Country, where he lived. If you call a room with a bed, rented by the night, living.
Whenever B and I talked about Bob, which always ended in a shouting match and me begging him to cut him out of his life, he would tell me Bob had a rough life growing up, a life I could never imagine, and he was the only one he had left. I felt for Bob, but I only saw his destructive influence on B.
I flew to Arkansas for Thanksgiving, letting Bob stay at my place while I was gone, making them promise not to do H, or burn the place down.
My mom woke me early my first morning home, saying B was on the phone:
"Bob's gone, Brian. Bob's dead." He said, crying.
"What! What happened?" I said.
"We got some, and after he shot up, blood came gushing from his nose. I called an ambulance, but I was too late; the hospital just told me he died."

B.L.O.: july 10, 1958. november 30, 1988.

p.s. I uploaded a picture of that Doug I was pining over, complete with Steve Diet's hand written nickname.

Links: Magazine, Paula Abdul

You Be Me for a While

2008-02-05T21:59:00.001-06:00

I just never get sick of listening to that (arrow pointing upward) song...

B moved in to my apartment on Pinegrove on Halloween, 1988.
There is something depressing about the telling of tragic love affairs that precludes my ability to write out a full name, even in an ancient tragic love affair, like this one. You know who B is. I wrote about him before.
But what makes a tragedy? Let's find out...

It was odd that B moved in with me on Halloween that year, for on a Halloween, ten years prior, is when I fell in love with him.
It's seems a little silly saying that I 'fell in love' when I was 13, but I knew. You know when you know. The way you see the world is altered forever, because of the way you feel for someone. It doesn't seem to matter how old you are.
I had a slight understanding as to what it meant to be gay, in 1979, but I hadn't an ability to put a label on how I felt for B. I loved him. Period. I loved the soul that occupied that person that was B.
I ask myself now (because I have a long standing bad habit of over-analyzing the sea of minutia in my life) what, exactly, did I fall in love with? Was it the way he looked, and how he perfectly fit the part, of a 50's greaser, in his slicked-back, black hair, and the black leather motorcycle jacket, blue jeans and white t-shirt he wore for our Junior High's costume day? Or was I in love with him for the fact he refused to 'hide' from our classmates any more, classmates who, for the most part, labeled us 'fags' and ostracized us. I would never have dared to dress up that day, for when you already get way too much negative attention for how you look, you tend to try to not look any weirder.

hmm.
and, hmm.

I've found living in a material world, while wishing to be immaterial, can create problems. Even though I had found a way to embrace what made me different from my peers, it didn't change how they perceived me. Growing up in that intense of an environment can create an addiction to an intense life. You just get used to it. So used to it, it becomes the norm. B and I found anything and everything to fit that bill.
I can honestly say that now I don't care how I'm perceived by the people around me, because I refuse to ever judge people by how they look. Through my experiences with people from all over the world, my perceptions have been proven wrong too many times.

I'm not sure what I was expecting to happen when B moved in with me. The first couple weeks were great, but I soon found out he didn't move in to be my boyfriend. I guess I thought that would happen? Maybe it would have helped had I mentioned that. But all I ever wanted to do was to possess him completely every minute I was ever with him, and that scared me. And I didn't want to scare him off. I saw him as deer in the woods sometimes: any little thing could send him flying away. I thought if I inched out my true feelings a little at a time, over a couple months, we could both handle it. It doesn't work that way.

hmm.
and, hmm, again.

I was to also learn when B moved in, he brought his H habit with him. I knew this because his friend Bob was back in the picture, and H was the only reason he would be around. B embraced his craving for a life of intensity, and let it rule him back then. He acted on the immediacy of his emotions, and fed them whatever they wanted. I hated Bob and what his presence meant, but he did save B and I a few times by shoplifting food for us at the White Hen, because we constantly spent every cent on drugs. No one could shoplift like him. Give him 3 minutes in a store, and you could eat for a week.
After a few days, B found a job for a while tending bar, at Windy City, where DSW on Halsted is now. It was a crummy old building that had a long staircase leading up to it's den of blow, and I climbed it every weekend. By this time B and I had had a talk about our future together, and while he loved me, we couldn't be boyfriends, but we could still sleep together sometimes. Friends with benefits, as the kids call it nowadays.
I drowned my sorrows in Billie Holiday, the future promises of Viva Hate, and scotch. For hours at a time. I can't imagine behaving like that today, so that's a good thing, I guess. I still can't bear to listen to her though, and tonight, while writing this, is the first time in 20 years I've deliberately played any of Billie's music. Which is too bad. It's good.

mmm.
mmm.
and, mmm.

As November drew to a close, I was spending more nights with Bob at B's bar, where B was getting dangerously close to losing his job. Little did I know one of us wouldn't live to see 1989...

Links, in order of appearance: Replacements, Kate Bush, Radiohead, Joni Mitchell, Morrissey, Billie Holiday

Uncharted Wrecks of Wonder

2008-01-21T22:19:00.000-06:00

I was thinking about clothes last week, because of my last post, mainly thinking about how much money I spend on them, way too much money, when I remembered I decided to become 'classy' sometime during 1987, not '88.
Jody bought me a beautiful shirt, in tune with my new aesthetic, from Cignal in the Century Mall, in '87, for my 21st birthday. A Le Garage shirt, I believe, and while watching TV yesterday, (PBS, the Jane Austin marathon) I was reminded of the stunning silver silk brocade vest Terry, a roommate from 1985, gave me for Christmas that year. I hadn't thought of that vest in years. I was shocked he gave me a present so lovely and thoughtful, for I had assumed he didn't like me very much. Maybe he was trying to make up for keeping dozens of his unpacked moving boxes in our hallway...

I found my new apartment with the help of an apartment finder, because I had good luck with one a few years ago. I played the part of a young man with his shit together fairly well, but I don't think the 'finder' really gave a crap. As long as I passed the credit check, I was the apartment owner's problem (or blessing) from then on.
It was pleasant and sunny the day I walked into the condo building on the corner of Pinegrove and Patterson, in May of 1988. From the outside, the building looked scaled down and smallish, but inside, the studio had tall ceilings, and large rooms; even a walk-in closet. It was wonderfully vintage, with great art-deco lines, and had a working fireplace. It also had an air of gloom and moodiness, despite it's crisp lines, so I thought it was perfect:
Wandering around the rooms I was soon to be occupying, I could feel the distance presence of dignified desperation during the depression, a mourning WW II secret lover, the tense dinners and sleepless nights of a failing marriage of the 1950's, an octogenarian shut-in longing for the 1920's while bearing witness to the free love of the '60's, and the beer can littered, protest poster walled life of a matriculating interracial couple; and all of it being swept away to set the stage for me to find my life of self invention and success and fame and fortune in the 1980's.
That was the plan, anyway...

I remember we also looked at an apartment in the building my friend Patrick used to live in, and a few others, but the the price wasn't right, and the current renters of all the other places were very dirty and sloppy, which destroyed any enthusiasm one may have possessed prior to the key turning in the lock.
I moved in with the feeling that this was going to be a great place to live, and I could get my life on track and find some happiness. My scary New Year's Eve experience earlier that year 'shook me awake', and sent me on a path of change. I partied a little less, and consumed less intoxicants, and even though I had been in this same place a few times before, meaning a glaring awareness of my destructive habits, and the short lived, monk-like life I would lead as a result, I was determined to change and stay changed.
I bought an exercise bicycle one hung over morning with my roommate Stephanie, prior to moving out, and used it every other day. Stephanie yelled at me while putting the bike in her car, because I was mean to the salesman at the store.
"Steph, I'm tired and hung over. I just wanted to get out of there as fast as I could." I said.
"Well, you could've been more polite. You didn't have to say 'Shut up and get me the damn bike' mid sales pitch." She answered back.
"Yea, well... "
I was making better money at my new salon, with my old boss, who helped me move with her little Mustang. I didn't have much to move, and looked forward to buying things for the new place. Looking back, I don't remember buying much. The large kitchen was empty, I kept my little black and white TV on my record player, which sat on the floor, and I had a futon couch and a butterfly chair in the main room. No coffee table, but there was a torchiere Consita had given me. I put some money down to buy a large colorful framed poster to put over the fireplace, but never finished paying for it.
Maybe because this was my first apartment on my own, I remember so many details:
Terracotta tiles in the kitchen, a built in dry bar in the main room, and the haunting glow cast into it's mirror from the recessed lighting, the minuscule, useless balcony, and the middle aged neighbor who sunned herself on it on sunny weekends, the way the apartment smelled when it rained, and the way my closet smelled of Obsession, and my medicine cabinet, crammed with hundreds of beauty products.
That summer, I spent every Saturday night watching Saturday Night Live, and Showtime at the Appollo, while waiting for Erin to pick me up so we could go to Limelight and Berlin, and our new favorite, Bistro Too.
Bistro Too was a trashy, drinks-crazy disco in the then somewhat rough area known as Andersonville, which we ran to from our parking spot by the hospital. (If we got beat up, we thought, it would be a short crawl to the ER.)
I hated the music at Bistro, and I always felt like a high school senior crashing a junior high prom, but the long islands were big, and the frenzy at the bar was very entertaining. There was a large evil blond bartender at the main bar who liked to have annoying patrons thrown out for the tiniest of infractions, and watching that was worth the price of admission.
The DJ could usually be bribed to play Buffalo Stance, my new anthem, a couple times a night, and that was all I would dance to there. OK, that and I Gotta CD by Disco 2000. (A song that is still great and really hard to find. If you have it, please send it to me! It went: I gotta Ceee-Deee! I gotta M-T-P! , or something like that. Another brill song/video from Neneh, from a few years later. I was to try and turn myself into one of the boys in white.)
Try as I might, I could never get the gas man to turn on my stove. I gave up after three attempts, and ate sandwiches, ordered pizza, and warmed soup on my Mr. Coffee for the year I lived there.
As summer turned to fall, the nights I wasn't out with Erin and her gang, I was out with Dehli, my friend from Wisconsin, who got tired of flying down every weekend, and moved into an apartment down the street from me. I can still see her brown, dilapidated, 1970's Mercedes sedan tooling down Pinegrove to pick me up for our nightly visit to Limelight, so she could fawn over, and occasionally bribe, her bartender crush, Jimmy.
My self discipline and abstinence were starting to slip away, and with Brad's recent request for a place to live, I knew it wouldn't be long before I threw it all out the window...

Links: Adverts, Neneh Cherry

Someone a Bit Like You

2008-01-17T22:28:00.000-06:00

Tranay and Chris used to call drag queens 'Larries': Hey Chris! Get a load of that Larry at 3 o'clock!
I think it came about because of the transvestite prostitutes that used to hang around Lawrence and Broadway in the late eighties, not far from where Tranay used to live back then. You know, Larry is short for Lawrence...
I call anything that starts with the letter L, Larry. Lost is Larry. Law and Order is Larry Order, Larry is a Pigsty, Little Red Larry, well, you get the idea.
Tranay also coined a good description for the mood created while walking around having to go to the bathroom, when you know you can't: poo stress. I have the worst poo-stress right now! Tranay would say. Just go! Chris would yell back. I can't! The bar's too crowded I'll sneak out to the restaurant across the street later! Chris and Tranay used to work at Neo together, back in the 80's, and being there a few weeks ago brought back their memories...
Speaking of Larries, I call Madonna, Eadozza, because of a poster of hers I had on my kitchen wall in 1990; her name ran down along the side: EADOZZA; the M turned into an E. It's pronounced ee-doe-za. Just something I thought you should know...

Sometime during the summer of 1988, I decided to become classy. Going to work as a goth or a hipster started to become tiring and time consuming, and I needed to sleep off the previous night's debauchery for as long as possible. I was inspired by one of my new co-workers, Patty. She was a legendary beauty, party girl, and trend setter. She could pull off any look, and all clothes looked great on her. On the eve of her first day of working at my salon, we all went out to celebrate and welcome her. The boozing went late into the night, and I barely got a few hours sleep, and the next day Patty confessed to me she got a ride home to change and came to work without any sleep at all. She looked fabulous. Her outfit from the night before was scandalous and futuristic; her style could best be described as Dale Bozzio meets a WWII fighter pilot, but her outfit that day was all about clean lines and order, aside from her huge, multi-colored, spiked hair, and her slight, yet still becoming, hang-over grimace.
What a great idea! Save the kooky clothes for the clubs!
My boss back then always dragged us to hair cutting classes around town, and a few times to Minnesota to the Aveda school. The well paid stylists who taught these classes all had the Hairdresser on Fire look, and cut hair like they were doing Tai Chi. They were taken seriously, and took themselves seriously. I've found when you're feeling crappy or hung over, a perfectly cut and designed outfit enters the room before everything else. You stand up straighter; you have more poise.
My ex-boyfriend Doug was a master at dressing that way. When we went out, I would stare at him from across the room as he chatted and giggled with his equally poised friends, praying to someday posses their unaffected nonchalance. His clothes were simple and modern and timeless, but always with a dash of Excalibur-like eccentricity thrown in: only he would think of wearing, and could pull off, a double strand of pearls with his brown vintage blazer.
But the secret is to don that perfect outfit, and forget about it as you walk out the door. You must have faith in it's power, for if you don't, your clothes wear you.
The wild girl Patty never dressed at work how she did in the clubs, the short time we worked together, and her taste rubbed off on me.
I bought my 'classy' clothes from Le Chateau, Flashy Trash, Xanadu, or Russo, if there was a sale. Once a month, I would shoo away the crazy teenagers who worked at Le Chateau, and looked at everything they had, and tried it all on, and did the fashion algebra (as coined by the great Anna Piaggi) in my head: What all in my closet will this go with? Can I make this look cooler somehow?
Russo was like dying and going to heaven, only to find the gates locked. Richard, the buyer and manager, had the most perfect taste, and called me (thank god!) the second things went on sale. (I creamed my jeans every time he complimented my ensemble: his approval meant I got it 'right') We both loved fashion, and I would hang out at his store and talk for hours about it, as we studied the clothes as if they were paintings by old masters. He and his boss, Mrs. Russo, were the perfect example of how to wear and not wear clothes: she wore a Gaultier jacket, he wore a great jacket. She wore Moschino pumps, he wore great shoes. They had on the same designers, but she was all too aware of the price tag.
One week, in 1988, I contemplated buying a 250.00 Gaultier t-shirt for hours. I visited it everyday. I loved it; it was black, with a cartoon of a 1940's teenage girl and a 1940's older businessman, dancing by a little portable record player, with 45's strewn about, and if you looked closely, you noticed they were wearing weird punk accessories in odd places, and the 45's were punk classics. It was brilliant. I settled for the not quite as pricey, but still pricey 100 dollar Moschino one. I still have it.
I still shopped at thrift stores to find clothes, but I usually only could wear them out to clubs. I had better luck thrifting in the early 90's, jumping on the 70's revival bandwagon before it was all snapped up. Shockingly, in thrift stores, I occasionally run across some of the clothes I studied at Russo and other expensive stores, and buy them, regardless of the fit, just to finally be able to put them in my closet.

Link: Gary Numan, Morrissey

Venus

2008-01-01T21:15:00.000-06:00

On Sunday nights, during high school, I felt like I was gently floating on a raft, slowly headed toward a towering, rocky waterfall. I enjoyed every moment, absorbed every second, and loved every minute of those nights, usually spent watching TV or playing games with my brothers, until it was time to be alone in my room with my music and books, for I knew Monday was coming, and I would be crashing into my oblivion, at dawn. Well, every night felt like that, but the sting of the carefree weekend ending was harder to bear.
High school was pretty dismal.
I was always there to greet the dawn, alone, after my dad went to work, and before everyone else got up, as it rose over the farm and the giant old trees that lined the train tracks, across the street. I would often pretend I was titled, in nineteenth century France or England, and made an elaborate breakfast for myself: eggs and sausage and oj and french toast and tea, using the good china our grandparents gave us, careful not to chip anything, as I quietly washed it and put it away, as I watched Underdog or Mission: Magic on the little black and white TV in the kitchen. I miss being ten... I would sigh to myself.
Winter time was always the worst, because I would have to give up the peaceful isolation of my bicycle, and ride the torturous bus to school. I worked doubly hard making the Sunday nights of winter back then feel special, by being with my brothers or neighborhood friends, or walking my dog in the backyard snow for hours, til he whined to go back inside, while listening to the newly imported magical sounds of Culture Club, The English Beat, or Scary Monsters on my Walkman. George's first sigh in Do You Really Want to Hurt Me carried me a million miles away, every time. But try as I might to keep it away, the heaviness of Monday morning's coming shadow lay dark upon me, and on the Wisconsin snow, like the night it's self.

I offer these memories up to you now, for our latest snow storm has stirred up a bunch of these memories, as they usually do. Not any winter night will unlock those memories for me, only a bone-chilling, snow covered night in January or February can thaw them.
I saw the circumstances of my life as a teenager as inevitable and unalterable, like a mountain that had to be climbed everyday, and carried the 'Sunday night' habits of my boyhood into my young adulthood. It is only now I realise I unconsciously created good memories around the bad ones I was forced to endure. Maybe we all do that to some degree. My time with my friends became my respite from the pain and confusion in my life, and I lived for them.
In the mid-eighties, when I moved to Chicago, Erin, Scot, Jody, Brad, Danny, and everyone else gave me a reason to keep on going, for I wanted to spend as much time with them as I could. I would not be here without them, or my brothers, for at times their unconditional love felt like the only thing flowing in my veins. I wanted to solve the mysteries of their lives, and use those secrets in my own. I tried to keep the worlds of my joy and pain away from each other, for I felt if they knew each other, my world of joy would be forever tainted, or worse yet, cease to exist.
But, as I learned, you can't do that forever. There came a time when I told the people I loved all there was to know about me, for only they could help me find a way to understand and solve the mysteries of my own life.
That is my new year wish for you. Happy oh-eight.

Link: Television, Culture Club, English Beat, Bowie

The Rise and Fall of Orbit Room

2007-12-04T23:41:00.000-06:00

Another rare, special edition post to let you know I care...

I miss Nunzio. I miss his amazing taste and sense of fun and style he had with bars and restaurants. The first place of his I visited was Bazooka Cafe, in 1985, where Angelina's, on Broadway and Addison, is now. It was a cool, kitchy place to have a tuna sandwich, when my friends and I had some extra cash. And Orbit Room, well, it was Mecca for the hip crowd, back then. I took special care to be sure I looked cool in the right way for that place, usually clad in liberal amounts of 1960's thrift finds. If someone said during the course of the night, Let's go to Orbit Room! I would say no if I wasn't dressed properly. On one of the few nights the dance floor wasn't packed, I remember Nunzio dancing to Brass Monkey by himself. He enjoyed his creations as much as everyone else did. Orbit Room's DJ's spun tunes very few dance clubs had the nerve to spin at the time.
It was hard for me to have a conversation with Nunzio; his quick mind racing from one topic to the next before I knew he had changed it. I often ran into him in the 'deposits' line at the bank, his motorcycle jacket on his 6"3" frame towering over us all. He always had a kind word for me, and a big laugh. How can anyone be this cheery this time of day? I would think to myself. Nunzio has since passed on, but the nights I spent with him and in his environs, I'll never forget.

Scot visited me this summer and brought with him a huge collection of photographs from the 80's for me to scan. He had the foresight to photograph the demolition of Orbit Room, in gloomy black and white, with Beth. Scot was always buying ashtrays for that place, for the customers constantly smashed them. Back then, huge tacky 1960's ashtrays were a dime a dozen in any thrift store. Scot invited me to Orbit Room's last party, some time during 1988, but I didn't go. The next day he told me how everyone ripped the place a part to take home a tangible memory of one of the coolest clubs in Chicago:
The Rise and Fall of Orbit Room

And as a extra special bonus, here's a Medusa's booklet. That's right! Booklet!
Medusas's 3rd Anniversary 1986
(Featuring Rex as the cover model. And click on any image to see it larger.)

Link: Beastie Boys

Painted Bird

2007-11-27T23:30:00.000-06:00

I began 1988 doing things I've only dreamt of doing. I was finishing up with the second half of my make-up class downtown, and am happy to say hang-overs kept me away from that class only once. I sometimes literally had to drag myself out the door during some of those sub-zero, dark-oh-so-early nights, onto the train once a week to the loop; always forgetting the closest stop to the school. I repeated in my head over and over: Monroe. Monroe. Marilyn Monroe: glamour, make-up. Why I forgot that every week, I'll never know. It really wasn't too hard for me to get to that class; the teacher loved me, and heaped generous amounts of praise on my tiniest of efforts, and was kind enough, during Contouring 101, to call my alcoholic bloat "baby fat". It was as if she knew what a mess my life was, and was trying to tell me if I focused my energy on my natural talents, that that could carry me to a better place.
I wrangled my roommate Margie into being my model for my final presentation, and the category I chose was, of course, Fashion Forward. I took these pictures at our apartment, after the train ride back home from the loop. I don't remember any 'incidents' on the train, but I do remember her not wanting to wash my creation off, and insisting we go to Berlin that night. Her face is so lovely, the make-up practically put it's self on, and back then I thought every woman should look like 1/3 Boy George, 1/3 Siouxsie, and 1/3 themselves, so it wasn't hard to do. I got an A+.
I spent a lot of time, most every night, at Limelight that entire year, and my salon did another hair show there. The long, laborious process of creating hair styles we deemed cool enough to put on stage was a lot easier this time. I actually don't remember what we did with the hair, and I lost the pictures, but I do remember the clothes. I designed and made them, building them off dark green bustiers: dissected charm bracelets sewn onto pencil skirts, black tulle for days, and laminated images pinned on everywhere.
That's a big reason I loved Limelight so much. They gave me and many others a platform for our creativity by constantly hosting events like this. The hair show inspired me to continue to create clothes and jewelry, and I even had nom de plum: Hellen Hevana. Coincidence? You be the judge.
I made clothes and rearranged vintage finds for a few other 'bazaars' at night clubs, and sold a fair amount. But all that work was getting in the way of partying, so I created less and less, and my salon was going through some big changes.
The rift between my bosses grew ever wider, and Consita and her partners one day decided to go their separate ways. Even though Bob wanted me to stay with him, and promised me a space to sell my clothes and jewelery, and a manager's salary, I went with Consita, because I was wrapped just a little tighter around her finger. Looking back, I made the wrong choice, and I often wonder what my life would be like had I chose door number two, but I guess that's what life is all about: the choices we make.
Plus the fact Theresa and Maria were going with Consita to her new salon, too, made my decision easier.
Theresa (her & I, 1990) had been working with us the past year, and her being an ex-punk and a fellow Wisconsinite made us fast friends. She was tiny and a bit plump, with eyes that were made for heavy black eyeliner. She could be sullen and quiet at work, but could let it rip when we went out. Her and I spent many hours deconstructing Consita's character flaws to the point of uncontrollable, therapeutic laughter, which always ended with the question, Why do we stay here?
A photographer came by the salon one afternoon, wanting to photograph us at work, so he hung out with us for the day and took pictures. It didn't take me too long to figure out he really just wanted to snap Theresa, and mainly shot her. A few months later Theresa came to work with the book he had sent her, and there she was; a whole page of her in the mirror lining her eyes. (I think I just ordered that book on line, and if it's the right one, I'll post the pic.)
My time with my roommates, Margie and Stephanie, was coming to an end (Annie having moved back home a few months before) and I was excited to live by myself for the first time. I would miss the girls, but their lives were pulling them closer to school on the north edge of town, but we promised to keep in touch. Oddly enough, Erin had moved into the very apartment, six years later, Margie had lived in in 1988. It took me a moment, on my first visit to Erin's apartment, to realise this feeling of deja vu was real.
I had many reasons to love living with them, but what I am most grateful for was their exposing me to the world of store front theater in Chicago. Margie was constantly going out to catch as many new shows as she could. I went begrudgingly at first, but soon grew to love it's close quarters, and intimate, charmingly grungy story telling.
Although I complain about Consita a lot, then and now, we did spend time together outside of work, partying, mainly, but we did see a lot of movies. I grew up across the street from a theater in my small hometown, and as a Senior in high school, in small town Arkansas, that's all there was to do. But the movies that made it to these towns were of the blockbuster Hollywood variety, and while I'm not knocking them, they do pale in comparison to the art house films Consita and I discovered together. We would seek them out, and weird Hollywood films that were cool and unusual: Down by Law, Mona Lisa, Withnail and I, Babette's Feast, Dangerous Liaisons, Dead Ringers, D.O.A., Salome's Last Dance, Lair of the Whiteworm, and The Moderns are a few that come to mind. I didn't understand most of these films at the time, but I guess that's why we liked them. We would discuss them, trying to tweeze out some sense or the moral they had to offer, with little result. But these movies looked great, and their recondite stories kept us coming back for more.

I found a cute little studio apartment on Pinegrove and Patterson in the spring of 1988, and I greatly looked forward to my new independent life. But had I known the drama that was to play out in that apartment, and how 1988 would end, I would have left town.

Link: Siouxsie

A New Dawn Fades

2007-10-21T21:55:00.000-05:00

While riding my bike last Friday night, I rode through the wake of women's perfume intermingling with cigarette smoke. I was so startled by the feelings brought up, I didn't think to look for who may have left it behind. I was reminded of the excitement of anticipation of a night out with my friends, the importance of it, and the thrill of new experiences. I still crave those feelings, but find them now by other means: traveling out of the country, acting in a play, or riding my bike for hours at a time.

New Year's Eve, 1987, my friend Delhi drove down from Wisconsin to spend the holiday with me in Chicago. She was running extremely late, so I had many hours to kill waiting for her. I was going through my 'purse and skirt' phase, fashion-wise, at this time, and I would comb through the thrift stores, or my roommate's closets, for just the right 1950's handbag. A 1950's handbag and a black leather motorcycle jacket, to me, is still a great look, for a woman or a man, and that's what I wore that night. Erin hated that I would carry such a purse, and I think I did just to hear her yell at me about it. During the day, I would wear a smaller purse with a long, skinny strap over my ankle length wool coat, with my 1950's men's hat, much to the disdain of the guys who stood next to me on the train. I guess I like it when people yell at me...

God, I hated riding the train Saturday mornings to work. I got on at the Addison stop around 8am, and it would usually be full of people, unsavory types, still partying from the night before, or people just plain uncomfortable to be around.
I always had a story to tell my coworkers each Saturday morning.
One winter morning, the kind of still, sunny, crisp winter morning that always reminded me of the winter days of my childhood in Wisconsin and Connecticut; the kind of day that used to send me racing for my coat to take as long of a walk outside that I could, to soak up the snow laden beauty, a man was sitting on the train, dressed in all white, though not warm enough for the weather, and was swabbing iodine all over his clothes and skin with an old rag, the whole time I rode with him.
I could tell by the look on his face his behavior was compulsive, and he didn't want to be doing what he was doing, but what was odder still was the body language of the people slouching around him: as long as he's doing that to himself alone, I don't care what he does. Unlike the morning I was on the subway in Manhattan in the mid 1990's, when the people in the half full car stopped in their tracks and stared at the man in the Santa hat who dropped his briefcase in the middle of the car and slowly bent over to open it and pull something out. Everyone but I held their breath to see what it was. I didn't care, because I had such a shitty time on that trip to New York, one more disaster wouldn't matter, and I could tell by the man's face he was just an ordinary guy, and it was December after all, and the something he pulled out of his briefcase was a piece of paper.
(More on that trip later. Chronology! I could write page after page on just that subway ride, let alone that trip.)

Delhi finally showed up at my apartment at 10:30. 10:30! I was furious! I wanted to be at Limelight hours ago. And really, I wanted to drink. It's New Year's! I want to drink, I want to be drunk right now. Where is she! I want to drink I want to drink I want to drink.
Delhi was big and loud in every way, and she came storming up the stairs to my apartment with some wild tale about getting lost on the drive down. But she came bearing a twelve pack, and champagne and raspberry liquor, to make those raspberry-champagne-twist-of-lemon drinks we liked so much. This was my first time seeing her since I had moved here, but we picked up where we left off, doing what we do best: helping each other drink and get into trouble. We drank every last drop of booze she brought with her, in an hour, and raced out the door for a cab to get us to Limelight before midnight.
We made it with minutes to spare, and caught up with Consita, my boss, and my Limelight friends who were always there. Consita, as I have already told you, was not the greatest boss in the world, but did we ever have fun when we went out. Tony kept the shots and Long Islands flowing, so all I really remember of that night are flashes of a swirl of noise and color, fake hellos and insincere new year wishes, and obnoxious affected behavior for the yuppie couples that seemed to be taking up way too much space in my playground. By 2am I had had enough, and wanted to leave. I stacked a pile of a dozen donuts like they were plates, and headed out the door with Delhi and Consita for a cab. During the ride, I chucked a donut at Delhi, and Consita laughed, so I thought she may enjoy a donut or ten chucked her way, too. I thought she was laughing, and I took glances at the driver, but he was just sitting there like this was his fiftieth donut fight that night. Consita kind of yelled at me when we dropped her off, and Delhi and I did our best to clean up the mess, and gave the driver a big tip, sadly knowing my hang-over lunch bag from 7-11 would be a lot lighter the next afternoon by doing so.
I was so furious at myself when I got home. I was mad at myself for mashing donuts into my boss's new winter coat, I was mad at myself for drinking so much in that short period of time, I was mad at myself for not having a boyfriend, I was mad at myself for wanting nothing more than to be wasted out of my skull, and having no control over that feeling.
That night, I tore apart my room in my anger, and smashed everything made of glass; I ripped up my artwork, knocked over my dresser, and threw things against the wall, all the while getting madder at myself because I was destroying my possessions, anger fueling even more anger, knowing I couldn't stop, knowing I couldn't stop any destruction that was going on in my life, and not being able to tell anyone why I was doing this, or how I felt.

The next morning, Margie, my roommate asked me how my night was.
"Didn't you hear me smashing up my room? I think I got fired, too." I said.
"Oh, I thought I heard some noise. How did you get fired?"
I told her my pitiful tale through the worse hangover of my life. Even though I had only drank for three hours, I was sick for days.
Me and my roommates laid around the sofa all day, thinking of ways I could get a new job fast, and I was secretly relieved I wouldn't ever have to see Consita again.
I didn't get fired that night, because they forced me to call her to make sure I was fired, after I confessed to them I didn't remember actually hearing those words.
She was mad, and expected me to have her coat cleaned, but I still had a job, during the crash of '87.

For years I hated to ever think about that night and the terrifying, utter powerlessness I had over my behavior, but now I know how important that experience was for me; It was the day I finally learned the truth about myself.

Link: Joy Division

Part-Time Lovers

2007-10-04T23:21:00.000-05:00

I'm sorry, I've been neglecting you, my loyal readers. I'm rehearsing a play right now, The Birds, and we open this weekend, and it's been taking up all my time. Come and see it! I am very glad to be doing this show, and it's been wonderful experience, but I will be missing many of the great bands and other theater shows coming up in Chicago in the following months. Check out the Reader to see what's on soon. Really, it's astounding. I'm most upset to be missing Morrissey, of course, but hey, what can you do?
I was going to tell you a mini 80's story, but with the passing of Pavarotti a few weeks ago, I thought I would share this story with you about him, to tide you over til my next shocking post: New Year's, 1987.

In 2000, I was in New York City, walking on 50th Street, and as I approached the corner at 5th Avenue, I saw two young girls, about 15 or so, hugging and jumping together, screaming and laughing, and pointing at a car that was waiting for the light to change. I wonder who they are so excited over? I thought to myself. As I got closer, I saw it was Pavarotti. Hi Pavarotti! We love you! They yelled at him. I couldn't help but caught up in their excitement, and thought wow! it's Pavarotti! Just then, a young lad of the girls age walked up to the corner, and asked who was in the car. Pavarotti! Pavarotti! The girls screamed at him. Who? he asked. Luciano Pavarotti, the opera singer! I answered back in a voice so nerdy and scary I startled myself when it came out of me, because I never knew I was capable of creating a voice like that. Oh. said the lad, as he and the giggling girls walked off down the street, leaving me alone at the corner. The light hadn't changed yet, and Pavarotti was still sitting there, doing his best to ignore what had and what was happening outside his car; I stood there, four feet away, waving at him, hunched over like a slack-jawed, drooling lunatic, for what felt like ten minutes. Wow, he's fat. I thought to myself. His head is leaning on the head rest, yet his gut almost touches the dash board. Finally, Pavarotti turns to me and gives me a strained, two second smile, and I cross 5th Ave., while I watch his car drive away.

Ok, I can't resist. This story reminds me of a story from the 80's. But it's very short:

One sunny afternoon, in 1986, I was walking on Diversey, near the el, when I saw Steven King walking toward me. Oh shit! It's Steven King! I think to myself, as my eyes almost pop out of my head. Oh shit! He knows who I am! I discern from his expression back to me. He starts walking a little faster, and I content myself with a little smile and wave in his direction. We obviously didn't have time to discuss how much his books meant to me, how I would act them out in my room, how I read everything he had ever written and couldn't wait for more, and my dream of writing a book as scary as the ones he had written. Sometimes a smile and a wave is enough, and sometimes it isn't.

p.s.
Par Time Lovers. did you see that? That's funny. Does the poster think Boy and Stevie are lovers of golf, or make love at the golf course, or say they are golfing when if fact they are trysting somewhere? The possibilities are endless. If you don't know what I'm talking about, click the title of this post to see and hear my favorite duet from the 80's. And to the commenter on the video, that is an expensive designer Gaultier 'bag' he is wearing...

Take Me to a Dark Room

2007-09-16T21:35:00.000-05:00

Halloween, 1987, at Berlin, was quite the Fellini-esque experience, and it's forever burned into my memory. At the last minute, Erin and I decided to brave the giant crowds Berlin somehow managed to squeeze into it's then tiny space, sans costumes. We bought some extra large drinks and staked out a bird's eye perch on their 'dance floor' to watch the night's debauchery. When Berlin was half the size it is now, and super crowded like the night was that night, we always bought extra big drinks, because the four foot squeeze back to the bar, and the hour wait for a refill was too much to take more than once. Berlin had a cash prize for best costume each Halloween, and people put a lot of effort into winning, so it was a great theater.
I say 'dance floor', because for some reason or other, we were hanging out in Berlin's basement earlier in the week with Jim, a bartender, and Erin and I were commenting on the scary noises above us.
"You probably shouldn't stand underneath the dance area. We technically don't have a dance floor, because you need special requirements and reinforcements for it, and we don't have that."
"Oh." We said.

There were many amazing costumes walking in the door that night, but the three I remember most were were Annie and Dave from their There Must be an Angel video, and the Sears Tower. Every Eurythmics detail was perfect and stunning; complete with the three foot crown and five foot long wigs. And the Sears Tower was beyond words. As a teenager I made models of every type, and none are easy to do, so to make a human-sized one, let alone one you could dance in, is a remarkable feat. He even stuck airplanes on wires to look like they were flying around him.
As the night progressed, the crowd worked it's self up into a frenzy, and started jumping up and down on the 'dance floor'. Erin and I knew it's dangers, and we grabbed the drink rail for dear life when we felt ourselves dipping a foot up and down, to the rhythm of Confusion and Why Can't I be You?. I started to imagine the floor's cross beams splintering a little more with each jump, and after an hour, with no disaster, we went to Smartbar. I guess we kind of wanted to see if there was going to be a disaster, for we knew it wasn't a very big drop into the basement, and the drink rail seemed pretty sturdy...

Thanksgiving that year was a pretty dismal experience. I couldn't get time off work to go see the family, and I didn't drive, and all my friends, including my roommates, were out of town. So I got it into my head that I was going to fast for all the people in the world that didn't have anything to eat that day. When I told that to my clients and co-workers that week, they all invited me over for dinner, but I refused. I was alone and at home watching TV, occasionally condemning the selfish world over the plight of the less fortunate, until the commercials for food started to get to me, and I ran over to the 7-11 and bought a bag of junk food, and a six-pack.

Our salon was invited to do a hair show at Limelight that December. It took us all day and night to get our three models ready for the show, but it was a great time. Erin and Donny came by to help out and pour drinks. We each, Maria, Consita and I, had our own ideas for our hair model, but I added a little dose of craziness to them all. Mine was inspired by Moschino's classic model airplane-as-a-hat ad, and a newspaper Mohawk I saw in i-D, though I turned it into a newspaper fall. So dangerous, I know, so I ripped the newspaper out as soon as the show was over. Thankfully, one picture of that night, taken at the salon, with me in the back round wearing Margie's sweater, survives. Tension was a little high that day, getting the models ready, because Consita didn't invite her business partner to do the show with us, and he was there working, and the two of them bickered back and forth non-stop. Our models walked down the catwalk to Les Rita Mitsouko's Marcia Baila, a song you all know I love.
This evening was made much more complicated by the fact that my mother, upset at my absence at Thanksgiving, because of my overbearing boss, decided to drive 13 hours from Little Rock herself, to the salon, to drive me home for Christmas.
"I just want to see your boss try and say no to your leaving with me when I show up there!" She said.
"Well, I have this fashion show thing, but I can leave after that I guess..." I said.

She pulled up to the salon, at Sheffield and Webster, around 9pm, in her little yellow car. She had that car for years; she would drive me and my brothers to doctor appointments and to school in it, so it was very surreal seeing a car I associated with my boyhood in the little town I grew up in, nestled into this big city I lived in now. Erin rode with my mom to my apartment, because she wasn't up for Limelight, to wait for me til 3am so we could start our drive south. I remember being mad I couldn't get wasted at Limelight that night, and I was even more mad when I got home to find she had cleaned my room, and discovered all my dirty little secrets. I was 21 then, and I lived like I was still in high school. Clothes and records piled everywhere, Boy George and Debbie Harry posters on the wall, half eaten food all over the place, but worst of all were all the pictures of naked men my friend Bryan would send along in the letters he wrote me, hidden under my sleeping bag. They were too cute to throw away. Maybe she didn't pay too much attention to what she saw, but she seemed to be more upset about the fact I slept on the floor, and gave me money to buy a futon. The second I got home we were on the road. It was a long long drive, and our only stop was for breakfast from a grocery store in the Ozarks, who's homemade doughnuts I still dream about.
That Christmas was pleasant enough, and I remember it because I recently looked at some pictures, but I looked like someone who had lived a hundred lifetimes, each one more miserable than the last. I was in an alcohol withdrawal haze, which always helps, because I hid my drinking from my family, and would only 'have a few beers', instead of the 8 million I usually drank.

I was thinking of the music and books from this time in my life, trying to come up with a theme song for this post, when I remembered how much I played Eurythmics' Savage. They made videos for each song with Sophie Muller, and together they make up a little movie. That CD and video compilation's fearless creativity inspired me beyond words. I guess it won't ever be available on DVD, so if you can find a VHS copy, dust off your video player and check it out. The books I read were everything by Daniel Odier, The Handmaid's Tail, and an attempt at A Hundred Years of Solitude.